It turns out that sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you’re alone. It feels less like a wound and more like a poultice.

Don’t ever let your spouse or partner blame an outside person or persons for the ruin of your relationship or their past relationships. If two people are committed to one another then no one can...

In history, truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost . . . especially against the narrow and futile patriotism, which, instead of pressing forward in pursuit of truth, takes pride in walking backwards to...

I thought about how the past can become so small. An entire day, 24 separate, heavy hours, becomes the size of a tiny brown leaf falling from a tree. Before you know it, a whole...

I have been talking of the past (your past and mine) only in order that you may turn from it forever. One wrench and the tooth will be out. You can begin as if nothing...

I believe in unlimited discovery and achievement.- I believe that dreams can become reality.- I believe in true love.- I believe in kindness and intelligence.- I trust life, regardless.

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence

Don’t sacrifice the present and attempt to achieve the impossible- to completely correct the past… It’s gone! Learn from it and move on…

When you live in the present, the past is forgotten & the future takes care of itself.

But it is always easy to put together stories about a past which nobody any longer remembers, like those about journeys to countries where nobody has ever been.

A deceitful man will go as far as to trample all over a woman’s reputation and spirit, in order to prove to his ex-love that he was faithful. The irony, is he is still in...

History isn’t all fact–it’s just the story the victors tell to keep themselves in power. And it’s been a slow revision. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to reinvent the past.

…before you, life was desolate – the past hardly worth remembering – and now, each moment a keepsake I can’t throw away …

Almost all sadness comes from thinking about the past, and all worry from thinking about the future — present-mindedness is your only safe haven.

Nothing helps a man to reform like thinking of the past with regret.

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

Sometimes it’s more painful to draw to mind the good times

Who knows what’s for true once a time is past? There’s no way to prove how something was that’s gone. And if a time is gone, what does it matter? It’s all rain into rivers...

A long time ago someone told me that a story will tell itself, when it’s ready.

When you’re in love with two people, always choose the second. The fact that you are constantly thinking of the second person makes it obvious that the first will never fulfill you, unless the second...

Just because The Past always hung there upon its hooks on the game-room wall, you didn’t have to pull it down and use it on yourself.

I keep coming back to certain books, and you—to try to find myself again

It’s not a crime to wish for other worlds. You’ll get taxed for it but they can’t throw you in jail for creating your own private world…yet. Dramatics are fun, an indulgence. ‘You can’t go...

Guilt is an indulgence, it entangles you in the past.

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory–meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion–is really a form of...

when you shoot for the stars, you can’t ever look back.

The past lives through us. We are its legacy.

VIEW FROM A HILLI am not yet quite over it.I am lying down on top of it.Surveying behind me a wastelandOf dried-up promise.While the lights below twinkleWith dull mocking uncertainty.There isn’t much left to look...

MOTHER TIME: Life goes by so very fast, my dears, and taking the time to reflect, even once a year, slows things down. We zoom past so many seconds, minutes, hours, killing them with the...

The present is an eternal attempt to separate the past from the future.

The past is set down in a thousand thousand indelible scrolls. But the future is a blank parchment forever in wait of a present.

She didn’t want to forget how deeply she had loved him, how important it had been to her; she felt as if to discard the memory would be a betrayal of her younger self.

…how time packs new years over the old ones but how those old years are still in there, like the earliest, tightest rings centering a tree, the most hidden, enclosed in darkness and shielded from...

Every moment is precious, even the ones behind me that I often reflect upon with a reserved smile. However…I seldom look back, only forward in anticipation of the next greater now.

Whether beautiful or terrible, the past is always a ruin.

Have you ever listened to a song from a long time ago; from your past; a song that was filled with so many memories tied to it, that you felt it so deeply- that it...

MOTHER TIME: The past is always with us, dear, for better or worse. It is what it is and you can’t change it. All you can do is learn how to live with it in...

You NEED to look back to remember the awesome memories, to remember the positive lessons you have learned, to help someone else learn from what you have lived and to see how far you have...

It is we who move through time, not the reverse. When we walk beyond any one of life’s instants, it becomes nothing more than a receding milestone. We can look back, but we cannot retrace...

Things didn’t really go away. You just learned to push them deeper.

The ascendancy over men’s minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised,...

We perceive, as from a great distance, a thousand years filled with dim shapes of men moving blindly, performing strangely, in an unreal shadowy world.

When I look back on my childhood, my earliest memories seem like artifacts from a long-lost civilization: half-understood fragments behind museum glass.

I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.

The one plentiful herds of magazine writers would continue to be culled – by the Internet, by the recession, by the American public, who would rather watch TV or play video games or electronically inform...

For some, excavating the past isn’t an adventure, it’s more akin to tearing a Band-Aid off an open wound.

Our identities are tremendously warped and distorted by yesterday’s trauma and tomorrow’s expectations.

The past should always remain in the past because the present needs your attention.

My father taught me that you can you read a hundred books on wisdom and write a hundred books on wisdom, but unless you apply what you learned then its only words on a page....

But there’s a beginning in an end, you know? It’s true that you can’t reclaim what you had, but you can lock it up behind you. Start fresh.