Past Forgotten Quotes & Sayings

Let God begin to rewrite your story. Invite him to show you your past through his eyes. Ask him to surface good memories you have forgotten. He would love to do it. There is healing to be had there. There is a replacing of regret with mercy. Though our past has shaped us, we are not our past. Though our failures and sin have had an effect on who we are, we are not defined by our failures or our sin. Though thought patterns and addictions have overwhelmed us, we are not overcome by them and we will never be overcome by them. Jesus has won our victory. Jesus is our victory. — Stasi Eldredge

It had been the longest time since she had had a rib-scraping laugh. She had forgotten how deep and down it could be. So different from the miscellaneous giggles and smiles she had learned to be content with these past few years. — Toni Morrison

The good and the beautiful is not forgotten; it lives in legend and in song. — Hans Christian Andersen

Memory is the place where our vanished days secretly gather ... The past seems to be gone and absent. Yet the grooves in the mind hold the traces and vestiga of everything that has ever happened to us. Nothing is ever lost or forgotten. — John O'Donohue

Citizens, not less generous than myself, let your most precious moments be employed in causing the past to be forgotten; let all my fellow-citizens swear never to recall the past; let them receive their misled brethren with open arms, and let them, in future, be on their guard against the traps of bad men. — Toussaint Louverture

Approaching the state of Delaware, the dreamer is a small dog, dreaming impatiently of a past life, long forgotten, when he sailed tall ships across uncharted. The salt spray of the ocean stings my face. — Neil Gaiman

Disraeli was now at the height of his fame and popularity. He still had his enemies ... But the people as a whole now admired and respected him deeply ... His unscrupulous past and cynical opportunism were being largely forgotten or forgiven. He was gradually becoming recognized not only as the prophet of a new Conservatism, at once compassionate at home and positive abroad, but as a great statesmen whom the Queen did well to honour. Power had brought responsibility. By 1878 the transformation in public attitudes towards Disraeli was complete. — Christopher Hibbert

There comes a point in life where each one of us who survives begins to feel like a ghost that has forgotten to die at the right time, and certainly most of us were more amusing when we were young. It seems that age folds the heart in on itself. Some of us walk detached, dreaming on the past, and some of us realize that we have lost the trick of standing in the sun. For many of us the thought of the future is a cause for irritation rather than optimism, as if we have had enough of new things, and wish only for the long sleep that rounds the edges of our lives — Louis De Bernieres

I like attics. They're as peaceful as God's church. Alone and apart, but a body can hear everything. The past stacked up like forgotten memories, but with a small effort, brought down and enjoyed again. — Kim Harrison

When you live in the present, the past is forgotten & the future takes care of itself. — Mandy Hale

We believe that the possibility of the future far exceeds the accomplishment of the past. We review the past with the common sense, but we anticipate the future with transcendental senses. In our sanest moments we find ourselves naturally expecting or prepared for far greater changes than any which we have experienced within the period of distinct memory, only to be paralleled by experiences which are forgotten. — Henry David Thoreau

Neither my father nor grandfather could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past. — V.S. Naipaul

We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still. — Terry Pratchett

I start the engine and shoot a glance through the tinted window, figuring if anyone is still watching, they can no longer see past my silhouette. Gray seems to have been waiting for a movement like this. He's waving like a dork and swinging my long forgotten pink hoodie high in the air so I can see it.
He's yelling, "Bye Jess!" He flips my hoodie onto his shoulders and ties it around his neck until it looks like a ridiculous scarf - as though he means to wear it like that for a long time. — Anne Eliot

she gathered a leftover dish of pasta (unheated), a napkin, a glass of ice water, and a loaf of half-eaten French bread into the family room. She bumbled through the large room, past a few opened and unopened boxes, setting down her dinner atop a pair of stacked boxes near the couch. She flailed her body down onto the couch, her long, slender arms reaching out to grab the water and the pasta, when she realized she had forgotten a fork. — Joshua Wright

[O]ften art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten ... — John Berger

And now every April I sit on my porch
And I watch the parade pass before me
I see my old comrades, how proudly they march
Reliving the dreams of past glory

I see the old men all twisted and torn
The forgotten heroes of a forgotten war
And the young people ask me, "What are they marching for?"
And I ask myself the same question

And the band plays Waltzing Matilda
And the old men still answer the call
But year after year their numbers get fewer
Some day no one will march there at all — Eric Bogle

All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors. — Ivan Chtcheglov

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. — Tami Egonu

Resentment always hurts you more than it does the person you resent. While your offender has probably forgotten the offense and gone on with life, you continue to stew in your pain, perpetuating the past. Listen: those who hurt you in the past cannot continue to hurt you now unless you hold on to the pain through resentment. Your past is past! Nothing will change it. You are only hurting yourself with your bitterness. For your own sake, learn from it, and then let it go. — Rick Warren

What I remember most clearly is how it felt. I'd just finished painting a red fire engine-like the one I often walked past near my grandparents' house. Suddenly the teachers, whose names I've long forgotten, closed in on my desk. They seemed unusually impressed, and my still dripping fire engine was immediately and ceremoniously pinned up. I don't know what they might have said, but their unexpected attention and having something I'd made given a place of honor on the wall created an overwhelming and totally unfamiliar sense of pride inside me. I loved that feeling, and I wanted to feel it again and again. That desire, I suppose, was the beginning of my career.
I have no idea where my fire engine painting ended up, but I never forgot the basic layout. Several decades later, it served as the inspiration for this sketch for an illustration in a book called Why the chicken crossed the Road. — David Macaulay

One can wait a whole lifetime for a moment like this. The woman whom you never hoped to meet now sits before you and she talks and looks exactly like the person you dreamed about. But the strangest of all is that you never realized before that you had dreamed about her. Your whole past is like a long sleep, which would have been forgotten had there been no dream. And the dream too, might have been forgotten had there been no memory, but remembrance is there in the blood and the blood is like an ocean in which every thing is washed away, but that which is new and more substantial even than life: Reality. — Henry Miller

The past has passed. Grudges are a poison better ignored and forgotten.

- Moroda — L.L. McNeil

My fingers curl through the holes in the wicker, through the wet grass beneath it, trying to hold tight to the sharp blades of the present. Somewhere in my brain a sinkhole is bubbling over, and each bubble contains a scene from a tiny sunken world ... I have never been the prophet of my own past before. It makes me wonder how the healthy dreamers can bear to sleep at all, if sleep means that you have to peer into that sinkhole by yourself ... I had almost forgotten this occipital sorrow, the way you are so alone with the things you see in dreams. — Karen Russell

I was standing alone with him when she burst impetuously through the door, tall and wearing a rain-cape on top of a queen's costume, a forgotten crown on her head.

She directed some rapid words at him. He began to tremble all over and dropped my hand from under his arm. Vera seized me cruelly by the arm and led me off... She led me through murky, dusty expanses, between strange machinery and constructions, through valleys and mountains and past a precarious wood to her dressing-room. And she still held me cruelly by the arm. There she slammed the door shut, rudely chasing away some handsome women with the amorous eyes of worshipers.

I do not recall her words. It was as though she were all aflame. She kissed my hands and I realized then that she had seen only me that evening, that she had performed for only me, that she loved me and that this was all such madness.

("Thirty-Three Abominations") — Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal

In the violent scorn of her revolted pride, of her indignant honor, had she forgotten a lowlier yet harder duty left undone?
In her contempt and dread of yielding to mere amorous weakness had she stifled and denied the cry of pity, the cry of conscience?
To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite. To forgive wrongs darker than death or night. To defy power which seems omnipotent. To love and live to hope till hope creates from it's own wreck the thing it contemplates. Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent.
This had been the higher, diviner way which she had missed, this obligation from the passion of the past which she had left unfulfilled, unaccepted.
Now the misgiving arose in her whether she had mistaken arrogance for duty; whether, cleaving so closely to honor she had forgotten the obligation of mercy. — Ouida

But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright son has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.
Because they have no memory ... because they are not human. — Herman Melville

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

Life is like a garden. Quite naturally, leaves wither and flowers fade. Only if we clear the decay of the past then and there can we really enjoy the beauty of the new leaves and flowers. Likewise, we must clear the murkiness of the past bad experiences from our minds. Life is remembrance in forgetfulness. Forgive what ought to be forgiven; forget what ought to be forgotten. Let us embrace life with renewed vigor. We should be able to face every moment of life with renewed expectation, like a freshly blossomed flower. — Mata Amritanandamayi

I left the library. Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness. I felt dark and hollow. Abandoned, unnoticed, forgotten, I stood on the sidewalk, a nothing, a gatherer of dust. People hurried past me. and everyone who walked by was happier than I. I felt the old envy. I would have given anything to be one of them. — Nicole Krauss

Were it not for Occam's Razor, which always demands simplicity, I'd be tempted to believe that human beings are more influenced by distant causes than immediate ones. This would especially be true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote. It's the old stuff, the conflicts we've never come to terms with, that sneaks up on us, half forgotten, insisting upon action. — Richard Russo

Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through is now like something from the distant past. We're so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about everyday, too many new things we have to learn. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone. — Haruki Murakami

Therapy takes us backward into a forgotten past, but this was not a safe and secure time, else we would not have emerged from it scarred by battle wounds and armoured in self-defense. — Alexander Lowen

David would enter the crucible of suffering where truly great servants of God are made. Perhaps you are there now. One of the most devastating realities of this kind of suffering is that often the one you thought would be your protector becomes the one who measures out the pain. All that longing for justice, for fairness, for having everything as it should be seems useless. As you think on the glory days of the past, your heart aches to turn back the clock, but you can't. In these moments it's tempting to believe that God has forgotten about us, or even worse, that He simply doesn't care - His favor has moved on. If you are there right now, my heart aches for you. No one signs up for this school of suffering, and yet the deep work that God does in this painful, lonely place is rarely produced anywhere else. — Sheila Walsh

The good news was that the newspaper he had ordered was right at his door as promised. The bad news was that he had forgotten to buy milk for his breakfast. So he dumped the cereal back into the box, swept the overflow into the sink, and put second best, a bagel, into the toaster while he read the paper. He was barely past the first page when the toaster started to smoke. He pushed up the handle; the bagel stayed down. Smoke continued to curl toward the ceiling, setting off the fire alarm. Swearing broadly, he silenced it by knocking it down with the handle of the mop that had come in so handy the night before. — Barbara Delinsky

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.
I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour. — John Berger

that the wars of the past were slowly being forgotten. Shea believed that one could turn his back on the past and build a new world with the future, never understanding that the future was inextricably tied to the past, an interwoven tapestry of events and ideas that would never be entirely severed. — Terry Brooks

We can't let the past be forgotten. — George Takei

That the past is ahead, in front of us, is a conception of time that helps us retain our memories and to be aware of its presents. What is behind us [the future] cannot be seen and is liable to be forgotten readily. What is ahead of us [the past] cannot be forgotten so readily or ignored, for it is in front of our minds' eyes, always reminding us of its presence. The past is alive in us, so in more than a metaphorical sense the dead are alive - we are our history. — Epeli Hau'ofa

It is as if the Caru'ee were able to perceive an echo of the past, and unconsciously, as they built upon a palimpsest of books written long ago and long forgotten, chanced to stumble upon an essence of meaning that could not be lost, no matter how much time had passed. — Ken Liu

I'd forgotten so many important things. I'd stolen away my own past. It made me feel like a coward. — Suzanne Palmieri

The past shouldn't be forgotten. It should be used as a guide for future situations and not used as a reason to avoid making difficult decisions. There was always a choice. — Maria V. Snyder

Forgetting! It is a form of suicide, a renunciation of the only good the we truly and ineluctably possess: the past. For if joys alone were forgotten, perhaps oblivion would be justly desired. But we are proud and jealous of our sorrows, we love them, we want to remember them. It is they that comprise the crown of life. — Iginio Ugo Tarchetti

Out of our deepest memories come the forgotten forms of the past,
given new life by the living sentience of an ancient and eternal forest. — Robert Holdstock

yarn, n.

Maybe language is kind, giving us these double meanings. Maybe it's trying to teach us a lesson, that we can always be two things at once.
Knit me a sweater out of your best stories. Not the day's petty injustices. Not the glimmer of a seven-eights-forgotten moment from your past. Not something that somebody said to somebody, who then told it to you. No, I want a yarn. It doesn't have to be true. — David Levithan

But should a sensation from the distant past-like those musical instruments that record and preserve the sound and style of the various artists who played them-enable our memory to make us hear that name with the particular tone it then had for our ears, even if the name seems not to have changed, we can still feel the distance between the various dreams which its unchanging syllables evoked for us in turn. For a second, rehearing the warbling from some distant springtime, we can extract from it, as from the little tubes of color used in painting, the precise tint-forgotten, mysterious, and fresh-of the days we thought we remembered when, like bad painters, we were in fact spreading our whole past on a single canvas and painting it with the conventional monochrome of voluntary memory. — Marcel Proust

Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. — Janet Fitch

Don't allow past experiences to be forgotten.
Hold them close. — John-Talmage Mathis

And soon all the people who had accompanied me through life would be gone, too, and then even the people who had known us, and no one would remain on earth who had ever seen us, and those descended from us perhaps would know stories about us, perhaps once in a while they would pass by buildings where where we had lived and they would mention that we had lived there. And then the stories would fade, and our graves would go untended, and no one would guess what it had been like to wake before dawn in our breath-warmed bedrooms as the radiators clanked and our wives and husbands and children slept. And we would move from the nearer regions of the dead who are remembered into the farther regions of he forgotten, an on past those, into a space as while and big as the sky replicated forever. — Ian Frazier

How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present to think of the character and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside and forgotten. — Washington Irving

In exact parallel to regressing people so they supposedly retrieve forgotten memories of 'past lives', Frankel notes that therapists can as readily progress people under hypnosis so they can 'remember' their futures. This elicits the same emotive intensity as in regression or in Mack's abductee hypnosis. 'These people are not out to deceive the therapist. They deceive themselves,' Frankel says. They cannot distinguish their confabulations from their experiences. — Carl Sagan

The language itself, whether you speak it or not, whether you love it or hate it, is like some bewitchment or seduction from the past, drifting across the country down the centuries, subtly affecting the nations sensibilities even when its meaning is forgotten. — Jan Morris

It is a strange phenomenon, how absence is the only authentic vessel of the past, how otherwise it is forgotten, overlooked for its continuity and perdurability - every sensory detail of the past breathes through its emptiness the way the light of a match illuminates the darkness; otherwise all is darkness, all is presence, everything in its place and thus unnoticed, whereas the past is missing, the part cut out of the photograph, the part the present attempts to seal over with the future, seeking to close the hole, pandering to the illusion of movement and change when in reality all of life is in flux, particle for particle, atom for atom, void for void, thought for thought. — John M. Keller

Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk. — Neil Gaiman

It surprised him that his grief was sharper than in the past few days. He had forgotten that grief does not decline in a straight line or along a slow curve like a graph in a child's math book. Instead, it was almost as if his body contained a big pile of garden rubbish full both of heavy lumps of dirt and of sharp thorny brush that would stab him when he least expected it. — Helen Simonson

Someone once told me that digging up the past has two sides: The pro is that you remember things you had forgotten about. Unfortunately, the con is the exact same thing. That may scare some people away, might force them to always be moving forward, never looking back, not for a second. — Pete Wentz

The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify by their own lonesome familiarities to this feeling. Ecstasy, even , I felt, with flashes of sudden remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass. — Jack Kerouac

As he stood there, the audience was forgotten. The past, with all its mistakes and suffering, its doubt and sin,
came before him for an instant, then vanished, and his heart leaped for joy, because he knew that it was gone
forever. And the future, made beautiful by the presence of Christ and the conviction that he was right with
God, stretched away as a path leading ever upward, until it was lost in the glories of the life to come, while he
heard, as in a dream, the words of his confessed Master, Follow: thou me. — Harold Bell Wright

We remember the truth because it has a name, is rooted in the past, but a makeshift lie is quickly forgotten. — Marcel Proust

Danger past, God is forgotten. — Thomas Fuller

There are so few people left alive from back then, you may as well be talking to them about the Black Death. Nobody recalls the shite in the 30s and that were fucking horrible. For Christ's sake, nobody wants to remember the shite in the 80s. It's all forgotten and swept under the rug by the newspapers and the BBC. They get nostalgic about the music, but they never want to mention the misery. It's all shite. As for the bloody Second World War, the politicians only talk about it when they need an excuse to go pissing about in one of those fucking Muslim countries. — Harry Leslie Smith

Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia. — Thomas Merton

The Church has for a long time looked like a Church of baroque princes. It is now returning to the spirit of simplicity which marked its origins-when the "servant of God" chose to be a carpenter's son on earth and chose fishermen as his first messengers.
If in the past (or even the present) the Church seemed too closely identified with the ruling classes, the term "Church of the poor" unquestionably expresses a project of fundamental importance, a willingness to break free of such chains. It also means that in the footsteps of Christ the Church is sent especially to the forgotten and the outcasts. — Pope Benedict XVI

Rituals keep us from forgetting what must not be forgotten and keep us rooted in a past from which we must not be disconnected. — Tony Campolo

Faey lived, for those who knew how to find her, within Ombria's past. Parts of the city's past lay within time's reach, beneath the streets in great old limestone tunnels: the hovels and mansions and sunken river that Ombria shrugged off like a forgotten skin, and buried beneath itself through the centuries. — Patricia A. McKillip

There is magic in the feel of a paddle and the movement of a canoe, a magic compounded of distance, adventure, solitude, and peace. The way of a canoe is the way of the wilderness and of a freedom almost forgotten. It is an antidote to insecurity, the open door to waterways of ages past and a way of life with profound and abiding satisfactions. When a man is part of his canoe, he is part of all that canoes have ever known. — Sigurd F. Olson

She had forgotten every problem, person and event behind her; they had always been clouded in her sight, to be hurried past, to be brushed aside, never final, never quite real. This was reality, she thought, this sense of clear outlines, of purpose, of lightness, of hope. This was the way she had expected to live - she had wanted to spend no hour and take no action that would mean less than this. — Ayn Rand

I dreamed ... in the black of night a man asks all the questions he dare not ask by daylight. For me, the past years, only one question has remained. Why would the gods take my eyes and my strength, yet condemn me to linger on so long, frozen and forgotten? What use could they have for an old done man like me? ... I remember, Sam. I still remember.
Remember what?
Dragons, Aemon whispered. — George R R Martin

Some pasts exist as a fog that rolls in and out of the present, formed not by air that condenses into mist but memories that condense into tiny doors that open to forgotten moments. Maybe you glance at a stranger on a crowded street who reminds you of a childhood friend or hear a song that was popular the first summer you fell in love, and in the space of that single beat of time you are flung backward to a who or when long past. And yet it is only for that one beat. Those tiny doors never remain open for long for most of us. They ensure our former times are kept as relics, and the dust upon them is wiped clean only occasionally — Billy Coffey

If we have largely forgotten the physical discomforts of the itching, oppressive garments of the past and the corrosive effects of perpetual physical discomfort on the nerves, then we have mercifully forgotten, too, the smells of the past, the domestic odours
ill-washed flesh; infrequently changed underwear; chamber pots; slop-pails; inadequately plumbed privies; rotting food; unattended teeth; and the streets are no fresher than indoors, the omnipresent acridity of horse piss and dung, drains, sudden stench of old death from butchers' shops, the amniotic horror of the fishmonger.
You would drench your handkerchief with cologne and press it to your nose. You would splash yourself with parma violet so that the reek of fleshly decay you always carried with you was overlaid by that of the embalming parlour. You would abhor the air you breathed. — Angela Carter

Blue stands for many things at the end of time: for the forgotten, blazing blue stars of aeons past; the antithesis of redshift, the color of uncut veins beneath your skin.
This story is written in blue ink, although you do not know that yet. — Yoon Ha Lee

She felt as if the grave stones were whispering those names to her as she walked past ... Those stones that bore no names seemed like closed mouths, sad mouths that forgotten how to speak. But perhaps the dead didn't mind what their names had once been? — Cornelia Funke

The reason the very concept of God has become at once so impoverished, so thoroughly mythical, and ultimately so incredible for so many modern persons is not because of all the interesting things we have learned over the past few centuries, but because of all the vital things we have forgotten. — David Bentley Hart

A baby is a small member of the home that makes love stronger, days shorter, nights longer, the bank roll smaller, the home happier, the clothes shabbier, the past forgotten, and the future worth living for. - Laurens van der Post and Jane Taylor — David Jeremiah

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receeding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you. — R.S. Thomas

And indeed, it cannot be denied that the most successful practitioners of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human system, so that when eleven strikes, all the rest chime in unison, and the present is neither a violent disruption nor completely forgotten in the past. — Virginia Woolf

A man should begin with his own times. He should become acquainted first of all with the world in which he is living and participating. He should not be afraid of reading too much or too little. He should take his reading as he does his food or his exercise. The good reader will gravitate to the good books. He will discover from his contemporaries what is inspiring or fecundating, or merely enjoyable, in past literature. He should have the pleasure of making these discoveries on his own, in his own way. What has worth, charm, beauty, wisdom, cannot be lost or forgotten. But things can lose all value, all charm and appeal, if one is dragged to them by the scalp. — Henry Miller

If there is anything certain in life, it is this. Time doesn't always heal. Not really. I know they say it does, but that is not true. What time does is to trick you into believing that you have healed, that the hurt of a great loss has lessened. But a single word, a note of a song, a fragrance, a knife point of dawn light across an empty room, any one of these things will take you back to that one moment you have never truly forgotten. These small things are the agents of memory. They are the sharp needle points piercing the living fabric of your life.

Life, my children, isn't linear where the heart is concerned. It is filled with invisible threads that reach out from your past and into your future. These threads connect every second we have lived and breathed. As your own lives move forward and as the decades pass, the more of these threads are cast. Your task is to weave them into a tapestry, one that tells the story of the time we shared. — Stephen Lee

Too many things have changed. Too much time has passed. I'm different now, a man with a pocketful of unconnected but terribly vivid memories. I was looking to dredge up what I'd long forgotten. Most of all, I am wishing for something to fasten all these gems, maybe something to hold them in a continuity that I can comprehend. — Andrew X. Pham

We traveled long and forgot why poetry was invented. — Dejan Stojanovic

Forgotten tones of love recur to us, and kind glances shine out of the past
oh so bright and clear!
oh so longed after!
because they are out of reach; as holiday music from within a prison wall
or sunshine seen through the bars; more prized because unattainable
more bright because of the contrast of present darkness and solitude, whence there is no escape. — William Makepeace Thackeray

Happy Memorial Day! Thank you to all our service men and women past and present. You are not forgotten! — Courteney Cox

Thrice damned she howls like Cerberus to the night
Guarding virtues that lie like forgotten stains
On oaken floors that pave the willow lined paths of the past
That lead to a meadow filled with the detritus of wasted love
Rotting under a forgotten sun that no longer shines
In a heart gone cold therein lies the haste of anger. — Neil Leckman

Why was this more difficult for me than for my father? I didn't know for certain that it was. But where I wanted to linger, he wanted to speed up. He wanted to rush through his Shepelevo, so he could again leave it behind and forget. With our American eyes we saw our past life. There was so much that needed to be forgotten. I was crushed by the relentless poverty of it. But the smell, the heady, intoxicating smell, more powerful even than the sight of Shepelevo. The sight of Shepelevo tore us up inside. Yet the smell was nothing but bliss. — Paullina Simons

History gives us the facts, sort of, but from literary works we can learn what the past smelled like, sounded like, and felt like, the forgotten gritty details of a lost era. Literature brings us as close as we can come to reinhabiting the past. By reclaiming this use of literature in the classroom, perhaps we can move away from the political agitation that has been our bread and butter - or porridge and hardtack - for the last 30 years. — Scott Herring

He'd forgotten all about the people in cloaks until he passed a group of them next to the baker's. He eyed them angrily as he passed. He didn't know why, but they made him uneasy. This bunch were whispering excitedly, too, and he couldn't see a single collecting tin. It was on his way back past them, clutching a large doughnut in a bag, that he caught a few words of what they were saying. "The Potters, that's right, that's what I heard - " " - yes, their son, Harry - " Mr. — J.K. Rowling

Ammon Johns has probably forgotten more things about online marketing and branding than most of us have ever known.
Ammon Johns is unique. He has a remarkably long career in an industry that does not really do long careers. He successfully synthesizes the knowledge and experience of the past with a thorough knowledge and understanding of today.
I have had the pleasure of seeing Ammon's mind at work and it is safe to say that I simply cannot recommend him highly enough. The companies that work with him are the ones that enjoy the rarest of things in today's world: a competitive advantage. — David Amerland

A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or regard that quality in its chosen leaders today - and in fact we have forgotten. — John F. Kennedy

Someday, the people we know, are acquainted to become the people we knew. They leave. They leave to pursue the opportunities laid down in their paths and they leave on account of misunderstandings.
Their absence causes a vacuum, a space, an incompleteness which we believe no one can fill. But someday, someone eventually does and that someone rekindles our hopes for companionship, until the circle continues and is ultimately intervened by the permanence of death.
The future is alarming, as atrocious as the past. And the friendship, the love, the memories either remain in our hearts cherished or are forgotten like an undeserving dream.
Everything eventually fades away, either for the better or worse.
Someday, the people we know, are acquainted to become the people we knew.
But then again, that someday is not today and so we must be a little more appreciative, for the moment, for the times, for the present because someday everything is going to change. — Chirag Tulsiani

We do not remember days, Shemei, we remember moments, and the richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten. — Terri Herman-Ponce

Many of the ugly pages of American history have been obscured and forgotten. A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present. America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay. If it loses the will to finish or slackens in its determination, history will recall its crimes and the country that would be great will lack the most indispensable element of greatness - justice. — Martin Luther

I found myself wondering at the impermanence of things. One day, I thought, people will have forgotten any of this happened. This war, these deaths, this demolition. Oh, not for some time, but eventually it will fade. Take its place amongst the layers of the past. Its savagery and horrors replaced in popular imagination by others still to come. — Kate Morton

For the past several generations we've forgotten what the psychologists call our archaic understanding, a willingness to know things in their deepest, most mythic sense. We're all born with archaic understanding, and I'd guess that the loss of it goes directly along with the loss of ourselves as creators. — Madeleine L'Engle

Recent fads in history and biography have increasingly exalted the aridity of chronology and fact, and have, with some valid reason, rejected romanticizing and the presumption of guessing at the inner thoughts of historical figures. Unfortunately, the result has largely been not to demythologize the past, but merely to dehumanize and depersonalize it. As Roger Mudd has pointed out, 'Too many of today's historians [and biographers] ... seem to have forgotten that the writing of history is a literary art. — Markham Shaw Pyle

The past only has power over you when it's forgotten ... ignored or repressed. — Mark Kendrick

I'll tell you all about it, but let's eat first. I've had nothing to eat. Although I was offered some raw squirrel. Canned pudding, that's what I want. I've been dreaming about it."
She hauled out a can and feverishly worked the can opener. She didn't wait for a dish or spoon, but thrust her hand in and scooped some into her mouth. Then she stood transfixed, overwhelmed by the wonderful sweetness of it.
She was crying when she said, "I'm sorry, I've forgotten how to be polite. I'll get you guys your own can."
Sam hobbled over and scooped some pudding of his own, following her lead. "I'm way past polite myself," he said, although she could see he was a little appalled by her wolfish behavior. She decided then that she liked him. — Michael Grant

In his arms I've finally found the place I've been looking for, where fear can't touch me, where memories can't reach, where the past is forgotten and the present is enough. Where the present is, in fact, all that matters. — Sarah Alderson

Art invites us to become explorers and excavators of our vast internal landscapes, discovering new terrain and digging deep into the past to unearth forgotten experiences and emotion. — Jaeda DeWalt

He drove the car back through the night to Paris. The hedges and orchards of Normandy flew past him. The moon hung oval and large in the misty sky. The ship was forgotten. Only the landscape remained. The landscape, the smell of hay and ripe apples, the silence and the deep peace of the inevitable — Erich Maria Remarque

In the future, we've forgotten it. It's disappointing to find out that the past is the present is the future. Nobody wants that. And yet, that's what it is. Maybe it's a kind of surrealist move, to use language like "post-racial" - thinking that if you create the language for it, it will happen. I wish it worked that way. But that's not our reality. — Claudia Rankine