#past

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#remembrance #the-past #beauty

Sometimes, at the least opportune times, the past is an insomniac, alive and well. ↗

— Courtney Cole

#past #beauty

Too many things have changed. Too much time has passed. I'm different now, a man with a pocketful of unconnected but terribly vivid memories. I was looking to dredge up what I'd long forgotten. Most of all, I am wishing for something to fasten all these gems, maybe something to hold them in a continuity that I can comprehend. ↗

— Andrew X. Pham

#catfish-and-mandala #change #past #vietnam #vietnamese-literature

Which is not to discount everything I've done in my past; everything I have learned tremendously from. ↗

— Rachel True

#done #everything #i #i have learned #learned

After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes? ↗

— Umberto Eco

#homer #iliad #justification #mythology #passage-of-time

Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go. ↗

— Brooks Atkinson

#go #god #imperfect #into #last

I didn't hear you come in. I was away with the ghosts of my beautiful youth. ↗

— Eva Rice

#past #youth #art

I mean, I don't know much about the Civil War, but whenever I think of that time—I mean, ever since Gone With the Wind I've had these fantasies about those generals, those gorgeous young Southern generals with their tawny mustaches and beards, and hair in ringlets, on horseback. And those beautiful girls in crinoline and pantalettes. You would never know that they ever fucked, from all you're able to read." She paused and squeezed my hand. "I mean, doesn't it just do something to you to think of one of those ravishing girls with that crinoline all in a fabulous tangle, and one of those gorgeous young officers—I mean, both of them fucking like crazy?" "Oh yes," I said with a shiver, "oh yes, it does. It enlarges one's sense of history. ↗

— William Styron

#history #past #sex #war #beauty

When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's 'The Thieving Magpie,' which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#pasta #music

My father used to tease me at the table by implying that “cold Claire” had brought in the draft. I had three older sisters, all beautiful, and I was always less affected than them, slow to smile. I remember finding it extremely hard to open presents as a child because the requisite theatricality was too exhausting. My sisters forever humiliated me over a moment in fifth grade when I’d opened a present from my grandmother and declared, straight-faced, “I already have this. ↗

— Marina Keegan

#beauty