#past

There are no lessons to be learned from the past. This is the first thing I learned from it. There is nothing back then that there isn't here now. There is nothing here now - nothing that matters - that wasn't back then. What matters. Are you a good person? Do you have any love in your heart? What would you do in a given circumstance? It all comes down to something like that. ↗

— Tom Lichtenberg

#learning-from-history #past #what-matters #love

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 year is just a pile of dead leaves on the ground. The year or so I’d spent in love with Chad was starting to feel so long ago, swept away by the wind. I knew that this year would soon feel far away too. ↗

— Kimberly Novosel

#healing #in-love #leaves #love #pain

The archive of supposed photocopies (I.E. memory) actually offers up strange creatures; the green paradise of childhood loves that Baudelaire recalled is for many a future in reverse, an obverse of hope in the face of the gray purgatory of adult loves. ↗

— Julio Cortázar

#past #love

I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been. ↗

— Raymond Carver

#intimacy #love #memory #past #imagination

These things...they are who you are. They brought you here. To this day. You didn't give me a chance to understand that ever the unattractive parts of you, the messy parts, were something I could accept. ↗

— Laura Dave

#love #past #love

Not watching the path where his legs took him, he walked on because he knew he had to walk ahead, leaving his past behind. ↗

— Faraaz Kazi

#moving-on #past #love

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#past #present #illusion

What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? What "grace" might have enlightened me? except that of passing time, or of a good cause, encountered on my way? ↗

— Roland Barthes

#memory #past #present #time #biography

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories. ↗

— Siri Hustvedt

#memory #past #present #imagination

We all have a past that may be worthy of some criticism". ~R. Alan Woods [2012] ↗

— R. Alan Woods

#r-alan-woods #r-alan-woods