I missed my mother and Elysius. It wasn't that I wanted them with me at that very moment. I wanted them in the past. I wanted to have back just one sunny afternoon together.
What would it be like to feel so attached, so intrinsically bonded, so protective of one’s own best connection with time and the ages, of generations past and future, of another human life, of their time?
...the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whaterver form. Both are illusions.
In our opposed forms of loneliness and self-recognition and recognition of the other, we touched each other often as we spoke; and on shore in explorations of the past, we strolled with our arms linked...
Nor should they be, but everyone needs to feel they're part of something worthwhile. That, in the last analysis, their life has some meaning in a larger context. The questions is what am I part of? What have I done?
Awareness is a gentle beauty. It hovers around me like a fairy, pointing to those things I would miss if I didn't look past the obvious and on the other side of busy.
There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn't. Sometimes the words fly over the fence and all the way out to the feelings.
He didn't like religion, hadn't liked it for years, but he adored churches, loved them like old scientific instruments whose time is long past but are nevertheless fascinating and strange.
When you die, you just die. No ghost, no reincarnation, no heaven. People want to believe that their souls live on or whatever, but that's only because they can't handle the idea of the world going on without them.
Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility. . . . Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.
People long to go backward in their imagination as well as forward. We don't wish simply to exist forever in some future; we wish to have existed in some distant past.
Reiko had not kept a diary and was now denied the pleasure of assiduously rereading her record of the happiness of the past few months and consigning each page to the fire as she did so. - Death in Midsummer and Other Stories
Not everyone believed in marriage then. To marry was to say you believed in the future and in the past, too - that history and tradition and hope could stay knit together to hold you up.
These past two days, I’ve seen a fire in your eyes that I never have before. Granted, it’s mostly anger and frustration, but it’s still emotion.
The old are often forgotten. Life moves on without a care for those who wish to remain in the past. We tend to talk too much because it’s rare that we’re listened to.
I’ve aged more this past week than I did in all six days that preceded it. Will you still love me tomorrow, when I’m an older man?
Look to the past to help create the future. Look to science and to poetry. Combine innovation and interpretation. We need the best of both. And it is universities that best provide them.
To desire to change one’s past means there is a desire to change oneself. To desire to change oneself, one must learn to change.
Cut away the nonsense, the drama, the regret, the scars of the past, and make a decision to no longer let them govern your happiness and freedom.
I believe that life is written out for you, it maps out your life to make you happy, but what I’ve been living for the past four years is my unwritten life...
The past can't hurt you anymore. Not unless you let it. They made you into a victim, Evey. They made you into a statistic. But, that's not the real you. That's not who you are inside.
