I MAY HAVE ALLOWED MYSELF SOME FLICKER OF EMOTION IN THE RECENT PAST, said Death, BUT I CAN GIVE IT UP ANY TIME I LIKE.
I can tell you that solitude Is not all exaltation, inner space Where the soul breaths and work can be done. Solitude exposes the nerve, Raises up ghosts. The past, never at rest, flows through it.
Dreams are composed of many things, my son. Of images and hopes, of fears and memories. Memories of the past, and memories of the future...
He was the same as everyone else: he carried his past inside him. There was no escape from it. No matter how hard you push it down, the truth always comes to the surface.
the past only had whatever power you gave it; life was what you made it and if you wanted something different from what you had, it was up to you to make it happen.
The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist ? It feels like it exists, but where is it ? And if it did exists, but doesn’t now, then where did it go ?
There were so many wrongs piling up on both sides, so much of the past being dragged into the present, that living there was like carving the story of your life on to a sepulchral monument.
How do I get past my fears? Make a life for myself? Risk loving someone? When death is all that waits for you, what's the point in trying to have a life?
Horror was written all over his face as he began to understand that that child of his wasn’t stupid, or immune to what he had done in the past. It had greatly affected her.
Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you’re free.
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.
