Past Never 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

In some ways more painful is the fact that their experience appears to be fading from the collective memory of humankind. Having never experienced an atomic bombing, the vast majority around the world can only vaguely imagine such horror, and these days, John Hersey's Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth are all but forgotten. As predicted by the saying, 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,' the probability that nuclear weapons will be used and the danger of nuclear war are increasing. — Tadatoshi Akiba

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

It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones. Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar. — George Orwell

Once I embraced the dreams that once inspired. Now I've found that there is too much I didn't recognize as a gift. I may be too late to see, cherish, and endure. I may never change, but be forever stuck in the past without realizing until my eyes open to the sun and I have forgotten the moon. — J.D. Stroube

[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

Will I always remember this day? Tatiana thought, inhaling deeply. I've said that in the past: oh, this day I'll remember, but I have forgotten the days I thought I would never forget. I remember seeing my first tadpole. Who would have thought? I remember tasting the salt water of the Black Sea for the first time. I remember getting lost in the woods by myself the first time. Maybe it's the firsts you remember. I've never been in a real war before, Tatiana thought. Maybe I'll remember this. — Paullina Simons

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

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

Sometimes a word, a sound, triggers an image or recollection of something forgotten. A search for the truth sounds romantic, a thoughtful quest. As often as not, it is as mind numbing as reading a list of names or looking through scores of obtuse documents in the hope of finding a clear pattern, divined by not much more than intuition and observation. A shrugged-off remark can lead to more truth than studied responses to severe cross-examination. — Jackson Burnett

The past is never really gone. It only lies in wait for you, remembered or forgotten. — Sharon Cameron

Many have forgotten what we came here for,
Never knew or had a clue, so you're on the floor.
Just growin' not known' about your past ...
Now you're lookin' pretty stupid while you're shakin' your ass. — Chuck D

But what Marie-Laure remembered, standing at the rail as it whistled past, was her father saying that Foucault's pendulum would never stop. It would keep swinging, she understood, after she and her father left the Pantheon, after she had fallen asleep that night. After she had forgotten about it, and lived her entire life, and died. — Anthony Doerr

There is nothing worse, is there," she said, "than a past that has never been fully dealt with. One can convince oneself, that it is all safely in the past and forgotten about, but the very fact that we can tell ourselves that it is forgotten proves that it is not. — Mary Balogh

One minute you are here and the next moment you are some place else, some time a long ago. That is the thing about your mind. Memories. Everything still exists in the folds of your brain; you may try to forget or honestly believe that you have forgotten but nothing is ever erased. Every memory is registered, good or bad does not matter. Sometimes you bring some out on purpose, sometimes some memory jumps at you on its own, shocking you, shaking you, making you realize how far you have come and at the same time proving to you that you can never really go far enough. — Arti Honrao

It was then that I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world's tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. I would give my entire output of words, past, present and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state "I hurt" or " I hate" or " I want". Or indeed, "Look at me". And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, or thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory. — Anita Brookner

The final vanity. This whole episode has never been about us. Can't you see? If this is happening now, it must have happened over and over. Who knows how many other planets we lost in the past, consumed as weapons of forgotten wars? Maybe all we see, the planets and stars and galaxies, is just the debris of huge wars - on and on, up to scales we can barely imagine. And we're just weeds growing in the rubble. Tell that to the Prime Minister. And I thought we might ask them about their gods! What a fool I've been - the questions on which I've wasted my life, and here are my answers - what a fool." She was growing agitated. "Take it easy, Edith - — Charles Stross

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

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

It was her favorite story, that she remembers, but she would be hard-pressed to retell it now, faithfully, as it had been told to her. All she could recall were frayed, sleep-watered images of a forgotten castle in the middle of a wild forest, stone statues, crimson roses, and a dark, animal presence never seen, but which stained her memory of the tale, even past its edges to the daylight after. — Ava Zavora

Wine talks; ask anyone. The oracle at the street corner; the uninvited guest at the wedding feast; the holy fool. It ventriloquizes. It has a million voices. It unleashes the tongue, teasing out secrets you never meant to tell, secrets you never even knew. It shouts, rants, whispers. It speaks of great plans, tragic loves, and terrible betrayals. It screams with laughter. It chuckles softly to itself. It weeps in front of its own reflection. It revives summers long past and memories best forgotten. Every bottle a whiff of other times, other places, everyone ... a humble miracle — Joanne Harris

I lied," I said ...
"I know it," he said.
"Then do something about it. Do anything, just so it's something."
"I cant," he said.
"There aint anything to do? Not anything?"
"I didn't say that," Grandfather said. "I said I couldn't. You can."
"What?" I said. "How can I forget it? Tell me how to."
"You cant," he said. "Nothing is ever forgotten. Nothing is ever lost. It's too valuable."
"Then what can I do?"
"Live with it," Grandfather said.
"Live with it? You mean, forever? For the rest of my life? Not ever to get rid of it? Never? I cant. Dont you see that I cant?"
"Yes you can," he said. "You will. A gentleman always does. A gentleman can live through anything. He faces anything. A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences, even when he did not himself instigate them but only acquiesced to them, didn't say No though he knew he should. — William Faulkner

... my body ... faithful guardian of a past which my mind should never have forgotten, brought back before my eyes .... — Marcel Proust

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

If you are in a pit of stress or despair, don't succumb to defeat. Don't accept that difficult place as your fate. Even though God has allowed you to be there right now, he never intended for you to live there. Our God is bigger then whatever problem you are facing. The only way to see past the problem is to believe that he has not forgotten or abandoned you and that, at the exact time that he has ordained, he will reach down and pick you up. — Tracie Miles

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

If Caribbean writers have one single unifying theme, it is a strong sense of place, and of home. There is also - always, beneath the humour, which is a West Indian characteristic - a sadness: an awareness of a past that can never really be forgotten, or forgiven. — Malcolm Bradbury

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

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

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

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

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

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