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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #past
When we can't understand the science behind something in this world, we make up mythological entities that we can relate to. We personify the forces of nature that mystify us, using our boundless imaginations to comfort us and make us feel like we have some control over these things that are much bigger than we are. ↗
There will come a time,' I said, 'when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this' - I gestured encompassingly - 'will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does. ↗
… the countryside and the village are symbols of stability and security, of order. Yet they are also, as I have noted, liminal spaces, at a very narrow remove from the atavistic Wild. Arcadia is not the realm even of Giorgione and of Claude, with its cracked pillars and thunderbolts, its lurking banditti; still less is it Poussin’s sun-dappled and regularised realm of order, where, although the lamb may be destined for the altar and the spit, all things proceed with charm and gravity and studied gesture; least of all is it the degenerate and prettified Arcady of Fragonard and Watteau, filled with simpering courtier-Corydons, pallid Olympians, and fat-arsed putti. (It is only family piety that prevents me from taking a poker to an inherited coffee service in gilt porcelain with bastardised, deutero-Fragonard scenes painted on the sides of every damned thing. Cue Wallace Greenslade: ‘… “Round the Horne”, with Marie Antoinette as the dairymaid and Kenneth Williams as the manager of the camp-site….’) No: Arcadia is the very margin of the liminal space between the safe tilth and the threatening Wild, in which Pan lurks, shaggy and goatish, and Death proclaims, from ambush, et in Arcadia ego. Arcadia is not the Wide World nor the Riverbank, but the Wild Wood. And in that wood are worse than stoats and weasels, and the true Pan is no Francis of Assisi figure, sheltering infant otters. The Wild that borders and penetrates Arcady is red in tooth and claw. ↗
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. 'When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "so it goes. ↗
The Old Days, the Lost Days -- in the half-closed eyes of memory (and in fact) they never marched across a calendar; they huddled round a burning log, leaned on a certain table, or listened to those certain songs. ↗
Holy shit. I've just been having one of the best days in my life. If not the best. I have a feeling of peace inside of me as I write this... I was just talking to a friend of mine about the fact that I find it hard to enjoy good moments sometimes, because of a fear that it may be taken away at any moment. And the truth is it can. This is not just anxiety, it is what's accurate. One of the most important things then is to know that I'm good with everyone I want to be good with, come what may. That the people I love know that I love them. And at this point in my life, I feel that is the case. I have no regrets. From that place, it's easier to enjoy what's going on. I'm not holding onto anything or anyone for dear life... I can't. Life just kinda makes that impossible... The other most important thing is this: acknowledging those moments that are worth noting and remembering, like today. My life is not perfect by any means--there is plenty that I could be fretting about at any given moment... In fact, part of my life is a shit-storm at the moment..! But today I chose not to concentrate on that. I was present, I was here, I was happy. And I would like to add to that: I Am here. And I am happy. Despite everything. ↗
Delving into the past had unveiled a cruel lesson - that in the book of life it is perhaps best not to turn back pages; it was a path on which, whatever direction we took, we'd never be able to choose our own destiny. ↗
#cruel-lesson #direction #past #path #turning-back-the-pages
There comes a moment in life when one must acknowledge that you just can't keep looking back into your past for reasons to keep someone in your present and future. Regardless of how much looking that cruel reality in the eye hurts...memories can't be enough. ↗
