the-past

The past ignorance has great lessons for us in our present day. Until we take real lessons from the past ignorance which led us into our present situation, we shall always see shadows of the past in the present.

...before you, life was desolate - the past hardly worth remembering - and now, each moment a keepsake I can't throw away ...

Sometimes it's more painful to draw to mind the good times

She didn't want to forget how deeply she had loved him, how important it had been to her; she felt as if to discard the memory would be a betrayal of her younger self.

Have you ever listened to a song from a long time ago; from your past; a song that was filled with so many memories tied to it, that you felt it so deeply- that it made you cry? And did you listen to it again, intentionally, for a second time? So you could travel back in time through that song; back when everything seemed so much simpler, basic, carefree? Those are the songs that are the soundtracks of our lives_ the ones that bring back childhood memories, deep feelings, snapshots of our lives (or short videos), best friends, first loves, first heartbreaks_ births, deaths. Our lives are like the record albums that we used to play just a few years ago; just yesterday. We played some of the songs over and over again- to the point of which we can sing along with every word as we play it. Other songs seem somewhat unfamiliar, as we rarely go back to listen to them; we skip over them or we barely listen to the start of it before we turn off the record player. But just like on a record album and just like in our memories, you can't cut a song out off an album... just like you can't cut out a memory. The songs and memories remain there, side by side; the good ones, the bad ones, the ones that thrill us and the ones that hurt. Those are the songs that our lives are composed of. Those are the songs that we chase back, back into our our own memories in our private and personal musical time machines.

October air, complete with dancing leaves and sighing winds greeted him as he stepped from the bus onto the dusty highway. Coolness embraced. The scent of burning wood hung crisp in the air from somewhere far in the distance. His backpack dropped in a flutter of dust. He surveyed dying cornfields from the gas station bus stop. Seeing this place, for the first time in over twenty years, brought back a flood of memories, long buried and forgotten.

Whether beautiful or terrible, the past is always a ruin.

When I look back on my childhood, my earliest memories seem like artifacts from a long-lost civilization: half-understood fragments behind museum glass.

The log on the fire: is it dreaming of the forest?

It takes just one day to remember one day! Mind today, for one day, you shall remember one day

I had forgotten, I suppose, that there were bright memories in amongst the dark.

It is said that nothing in our lives is ever lost, that nothing can prevent its having been. That is why, so very often the weight of the past lies ineluctably upon the present. But that is why it is so real in memory, so wholly itself, so far beyond replacement.

I was haunting you, for so long, that I forgot that I became a ghost too.

Things didn't really go away. You just learned to push them deeper.

I was yours once till death if you cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now--I can't hang about whining for ever--and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked and attend to your own happiness?

Was she Minh Thuy, finally, or was she Jenny? But the time when there had been a meaningful difference between the two would come to seem like a tiny neighborhood where you couldn't decide which house was yours. Which felt important when you were high above, you thought, in the foothills, but not so much at the truer remove of a continent, where the lives you'd lived and the places you'd come from, dwindled to a single point on the horizon, in the incorrigibly distant past.

What he had remembered was to tuck among his changes of clothes one of Regan's framed photographs of the four of them from a few summers back, at Lake Winnipesaukee. He set it up on the nightstand, as if he might swim down into the past, where nothing could go wrong.

Why is it that happiness remembered feels like despair?