What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
William MaxwellTags: past revision revisionism the-past
No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That's all.
Haruki MurakamiTags: the-past
When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.
Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.
It follows that the one thing we should not do to the men and women of past time, and particularly if they ghost through to us as larger than life, is to take them out of their historical contexts. To do so is to run the risk of turning them into monsters, whom we can denounce for our (frequently political) motives—an insidious game, because we are condemning in their make-up that which is likely to belong to a whole social world, the world that helped to fashion them and that is deviously reflected or distorted in them. Censure of this sort is the work of petty moralists and propagandists, not historians (p. 5).
Lauro MartinesTags: history memory historians censure the-past context moralists propagandists
Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
Chuck PalahniukLooking at the past is like lolling in a rocking chair. It is so relaxing and you can rock back and forth on the porch, and never go forward.
Martha GrahamTags: the-past
Live out of your imagination, not your history.
Stephen R. CoveyTags: imagination history the-past stephen-covey
It baffles me that people think that obliterating the past will save them from its consequences, as if throwing away the empty cake plate would help you lose weight.
Timothy B. TysonTags: cake the-past consequenses
When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
Margaret AtwoodTags: memory remembrance the-past
how sad and bad and mad it was - but then, how it was sweet
Robert BrowningTags: love nostalgia reflection the-past
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