Remember Past Time Quotes & Sayings

The asymmetry of time, the arrow that points from past to future, plays an unmistakable role in our everyday lives: it accounts for why we cannot turn an omelet into an egg, why ice cubes never spontaneously unmelt in a glass of water, and why we remember the past but not the future. And the origin of the asymmetry we experience can be traced all the way back to the orderliness of the universe near the big bang. Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology. — Sean M. Carroll

I see Sarah framed in the light of her doorway and it is like looking at a painting that emanate a mixture of wishes and truths about someone I loved - from a time I can already vividly remember. I wonder if this is a hazard of being a writer: a sense of detachment that sometimes makes the present seem like it is already past. — Annie Rogers

Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember.
Lies 2: Time is a straight line.
Lies 3: The difference between the past and the futures is that one has happened while the other has not.
Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time.
Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves ... )
Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon.
Lies 7: Reality is truth. — Jeanette Winterson

It's still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out. — Maya Angelou

Much as we wish, not one of us can bring back yesterday or shape tomorrow. Only today is ours, and it will not be ours for long, and once it is gone it will never in all time be ours again. Thou only knowest what it holds in store for us, yet even we know something of what it will hold. The chance to speak the truth, to show mercy, to ease another's burden. The chance to resist evil, to remember all the good times and good people of our past, to be brave, to be strong, to be glad. — Frederick Buechner

If I were to tell this story the way history is usually written or the way each of us recalls his own past, which means recording only the most glorious moments and inventing a new continuity for them, I should omit these little details and say that our eight stout hearts drummed from morning to night in time with a single all-encompassing desire - or some such lie. But the flame that kindles desire and illuminates thought never burned for more than a few seconds at a stretch. The rest of the time we tried to remember it.
Fortunately the demands of daily work, in which each of us had his vital role, reminded us that we had come aboard of our own free will, that we were indispensable to one another, and that we were on a ship - that is to say, in a temporary habitation, designed to transport us somewhere else. If anyone forgot it, someone else lost no time in reminding him. — Rene Daumal

Today, I will try to remember to regret the past. I will think of how many mistakes I have made throughout my life. I will say to myself, "If only I could go back in time and make different choices, so that my life could be the way it should have been." Then I will remind myself that I cannot. — John S. Hall

Nurses are natural kleptos. You don't want to be in a roon without enough supplies, so every time you walk past the med-cart you pocket another saline flush. By the end of the shift you can look like a chipmunk if you're not careful. Some days it's hard to remember that the gum at the end of the grocery aisle isn't there just for you. — Cassie Alexander

I remember when the houses used to whiz by as I walked - nearly running - to and from home. Ma would ask me afterwards about what I'd seen, whether certain neighbours were out, what I thought about someone's new garden wall. I'd never noticed; it had all gone past in a flash. Now I have plenty of time to look at everything, and no one to tell what I've seen. — Emma Healey

I was dying, of course, but then we all are. Every day, in perfect increments, I was dying of loss.
The only help for my condition, then as now, is that I refused to let go of what I loved. I wrote everything down, at first in choppy fragments; a sentence here, a few words there, it was the most I could handle at the time. Later I wrote more, my grief muffled but not eased by the passage of time.
When I go back over my writing now I can barely read it. The happiness is the worst. Some days I can't bring myself to remember. But I will not relinquish a single detail of the past. What remains of my life depends on what happened six years ago.
In my brain, in my limbs, in my dreams, it is still happening. — Meg Rosoff

People think it way past the time when anybody can remember who start things first, but don't get the history of the ghetto twist up, decent people. Buntin-Banton and Dishrag start it first. And when PNP win the 1972 election all hell break loose. First — Marlon James

Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details, though, have long since been transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. One alters the past to form the future. — James Salter

I thought you'd be gone by now." Velkan
"Hardly, I have to much to do." Esperetta
"Such as?" Velkan
"Apologize to you." Esperetta
"Why would you do that?" Velkan
"Because I'm stupid and pigheaded. Judgmental. Unforgiving. Mistrustful
you can stop me at anytime, you know?" Esperetta
"Why should i? You're on quite a roll. Besides, you missed the worst flaw." Velkan
"And that is?" Esperetta
"Hotheaded." Velkan
"I learned that one from you." Esperetta
"How so?" Velkan
"Remember that time you threw your boots into the fire because you had trouble getting them off?"
"I never did that." Velkan
"Yes, you did. You also gave your favorite saddle to the stable master because it scratched your leg as you dismounted and told him he could have it but, personally, you'd burn it, too." Esperetta — Sherrilyn Kenyon

When the time is right, life will have a meaning.
When the time is right, world will be bright again.
When the time is right, things will fall into place.
Just remember, never regret. — Akash Lakhotia

If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I'm the last person to ask 'what do you remember' from a particular time period ... I like to learn from the past ... not 'live' in it. — David Coverdale

You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn't a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirted or avoided for years, they come cropping back up and stare you full in the face, and one aspect of depression is a deep knowledge that the comforting doctors who assure you that your judgment is bad are wrong. You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it. When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better. — Andrew Solomon

It's not that I can't remember. It's that I prefer not to remember, which means that I prefer not to remember what not remembering did to me the last time I did it. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

When we write memoir we are re-creating, sorting through the layer of remembering, to put form and shape to our experience through language. By borrowing from the techniques of fiction and poetry, we are able to make the events of our past come alive, creating detailed pictures of time and place and portraits of the people who have come and gone in our lives. We use scene and dialogue, challenging ourselves to recall how someone talked, what they said (or more accurately, what we remember that they said) and how we felt when moving among the people and events of our past. — Janice Gray

All the king's horses and all the king's men can't put the past together again. So let's remember: Don't try to saw sawdust. — Dale Carnegie

... We need to remember that the most significant events in the last 2,000 years were not the marvels of science, technology, and travel. They were the Savior's Atonement and the restoration of the gospel, with the priesthood keys and authority. These two singular events will continue to be of transcendent importance to mankind as we move forward in time. The past, present, and future pivot on these marvelous divine interventions. — James E. Faust

She remembered him smiling, and realized that time, that great old healer, had finally accomplished its work, and now, across the years, the face of love no longer stirred up agonies of grief and bitterness. Rather, one was left feeling simply grateful. For how unimaginably empty the past would be without him to remember. — Rosamunde Pilcher

God's already let go of your past. He doesn't remember it. He doesn't count it against you. Now it's time for you to let go too. — Jody Hedlund

I can't help its being gay. I have been a full-time fag for the past five years, I realized the other day. Everyone I know is gay, everything I do is gay, all my fantasies are gay, I am what Gus called those people we used to see in the discos, bars, baths, all the time - remember? Those people we used to see EVERYWHERE, every time we went out, so that you wanted to call the police and have them arrested? - I am a doomed queen.
I would LIKE to be a happily married attorney with a house in the suburbs, 2.6 kids, and a station wagon, in which we would drive every summer to see the Grand Canyon, but I'm not! I am completely, hopelessly gay! — Andrew Holleran

I remember the first time I went to Italy when I was eighteen, I was in Florence and there were all these eighteen, nineteen, twenty-year-olds gliding past on Vespas with crinkly, long, hair, and I thought I was on the set of a movie. I couldn't believe that this was going on and I hadn't known about it before. I was flabbergasted. — Walter Kirn

I don't remember why it all went so wrong. I mean, I do remember. I remember what i did. I just don't remember why anymore. This - you and me - this feels so right. It just seems stupid - so stupid - that we had it before, and we let it go. We wasted so much time. I'm sorry.' She was close to tears.
'Hey. Don't. There's no point in that. It's the past, and that's where it belongs. This is us now. We're here.'
But where's here? We're hiding out. We're playing house. This isn't real life.'
'It feels real to me.'
'But it isn't. — Elizabeth Noble

Anyway, time is more than counting days. On the outside, people think clocks tell them the time. They set an alarm for work and wake up to a blinking light that says six a.m. They look to an office wall to tell them if it is time to go home. The truth is, clocks don't tell time. Time is measured in meaning. I better get up for work or It's time to feed the baby. Or That was the year I got cancer or That is the day we celebrate your birthday. Or Remember when our father died or Let's remember to plant turnips this spring. It is meaning that drives most people forward into time, and it is meaning that reminds them of the past, so they know where they are in the universe. — Rene Denfeld

However, narrating what you remember, telling it to someone, does something else. The more a person recalls a memory, the more they change it. Each time they put it into language, it shifts. The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, creates a fiction you can live with. It's what writers do. Once you open your mouth, you are moving away from the truth of things. According to neuroscience. The safest memories are locked in the brains of people who can't remember. Their memories remain the closest replica of actual events. Underwater. Forever. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Mrs. Casey, do you love Christmas?
Well you know, she answered reflectively, Christmas can be a sad time for people too. It's a remembering time for us older ones. We remember the people who are gone.
Oh, I never thought of that, I told her in surprise.
Well that's youth for you, she said; you don't start to look back over your shoulder until there is something to look back at, and around Christmas I tend to think of the Christmases past and the people gone with them. — Alice Taylor

Although our body gets older, our spirit only experiences present time. So, the question is: Why can we remember the past but not predict the future? And the answer is related to our purpose as a spiritual being. If we knew the future, we could easily avoid responsibility and delay our spiritual development. — Daniel Marques

And in time we may remember, collecting every little memory, all the bits and pieces, into a larger memory, rebuilding a great layered and labyrinthine, now imagined, international hotel of many rooms, the urban experiment of a homeless community built to house the needs of temporary lives. And for what? To resist death and dementia. To haunt a disappearing landscape. To forever embed this geography with our visions and voices. To kiss the past and you good-bye, leaving the indelible spit of our DNA on still moist lips. Sweet. Sour. Salty. Bitter. — Karen Tei Yamashita

I've heard it said, time heals all wounds, but if a dream can pull you so deeply into your past you can't remember the present, I'm not sure my wounds will ever heal. — C.J. Roberts

Everyone is lonely," Ranulf said, but he smiled. "We have to remember that life is to be lived one day at a time. You cannot worry about past or future. Happiness is in the now."
Raquel laughed. "Vic has totally brainwashed you. — Claudia Gray

The answers would come to her. No need to rush them. Ten years ago, but so well remember it was as if it had happened yesterday, she had suffered the repercussions brought on by thoughtless rushing. This time, she would wait. Not wait for him to act, like she had been doing these past months. She would wait to see how she would act. — Anne Cherian

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this. — Margaret Atwood

Our inner experience is that which we think, feel, remember, perceive, sense, decide, plan and predict. These experiences are actually mental actions, or mental activity (Van der Hart et al., 2006). Mental activity, in which we engage all the time, may or may not be accompanied by behavioral actions. It is essential that you become aware of, learn to tolerate and regulate, and even change major mental actions that affect your current life, such as negative beliefs, and feelings or reactions to the past the interfere with the present. However, it is impossible to change inner experiences if you are avoiding them because you are afraid, ashamed or disgusted by them. Serious avoidance of you inner experiences is called experiential avoidance (Hayes, Wilson, Gifford, & Follettte, 1996), or the phobia of inner experience (Steele, Van der Hart, & Nijenhuis, 2005; Van der Hart et al., 2006). — Suzette Boon

Every time I jerked off over the past few days, I thought about you. Forget the chicks - I'm going with the dicks. Well," he made a face, "one dick, I mean. My own private dick. Start off slow, you know, and then build up to the orgies."
Rhodes brought his lips down onto Wash's smiling mouth. "My dick," Rhodes growled against the curve of Wash's lips. "And my dick only. Remember that. — Katie Allen

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years. — Khaled Hosseini

The opposite of esprit d'escalier is the way that life's embarrassments come back to haunt us even after they're long past. I could remember every stupid thing I'd ever said or done, recall them with picture-perfect clarity. Any time I was feeling low, I'd naturally start to remember other times I felt that way, a hit parade of humiliations coming one after another to my mind. — Cory Doctorow

Plane Ride -
In our sport it is natural and necessary to set up goals to inspire us. We all want to achieve the next level, the break-thru performance. What we (all of us) must not forget is that the journey to these goals is the best part. The daily process of obtaining success takes up the majority of our time and effort throughout our lives. Remember to appreciate what you've done in the past and what you are doing in the present on your way to higher goals. This will allow you to always strive for something more without missing out on the fact that your path to success is as much a starting point as it is a finish line. — Matthew Alan

Diamonds are held under tons and tons of pressure, extremely high temperatures of fire and shuffled under shifting of tectonic plates, for a long, long time! Yet when they come out from there and are put on display for their beauty; does anybody stop to evaluate the diamond based upon all the shit it's been through and say "Remember that disgusting hole it used to be in? I bet it was hell in there!" No, people don't remember where a diamond has come from; they just see the beauty of it now. But it wouldn't have become so beautiful, you know, if not for all of that! So why should we look at other people, or at ourselves and evaluate them/ourselves based upon their/our pasts? Shouldn't we forget that? And only see the beauty that is in front of our eyes? Whatever it was, it made you beautiful! And that is what matters! — C. JoyBell C.

It was time to let go of the mad desire to remember. It was time to start living whatever life would come. In the present, not the past. — Adi Alsaid

I am suggesting is that the past, as we remember it, has little to do with causal or determining factos that have in some way made, or influenced, us as we are today. Rather, the remembered past provides us with the means to maintain, or validate, who we are today and to give focus and direction to who we might wish to become at some future point in time. — Ernesto Spinelli

Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn't done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They're back now, after all - raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire. — Peter Watts

You could remember the sensual observations that made that day reality, and you could delude yourself into thinking - almost - that you could return to the past, and relive the days and hours in a quick space of time. But no, the quest of time past is more difficult than you think, and time present is eaten up by such plaintive searchings. The film of your days and nights is wound up tight in you, never to be re-run - and the occasional flashbacks are faint, blurred, unreal, as if seen through falling snow. — Sylvia Plath

To me, the songs I play are milestones of my past. Playing one will recall that time period for me, but I don't have the desire to recall it - at least not now.
But I know I can't stay away from it forever. Never playing again would be like choosing not to remember - or to feel.
And that is not the type of creature I am. — J.P. Cianci

Home is the place you return to when you have finally lost your soul. Home is the place where life is born, not the place of your birth, but the place where you seek rebirth. When you no longer have to remember which tale of your own past is true and which is an invention, when you know that you are an invention, then is the time to seek out your home. Perhaps only when you have come to understand that can you finally reach home. — Karen Maitland

It's hard to explain how an infatuation actually starts. It's a state so all-encompassing that it's almost impossible to remember how it felt to live inside your own head before it began. Everything that precedes it becomes a pathway that was always leading there. Time before is valuable only as a resource with which to create a persona, to bind the object of the infatuation closer. I had given my (partially fabricated) past life to Mizuko to make a story that in the end never got told. Or not by her. It is also hard to explain the intensity of the infatuation itself. There is rarely an explanation that seems reasonable to anyone but you. Unless you're part of a cult or viral phenomenon, so that when you weep outside the object of your infatuation's hotel room, you do so in the company of millions. — Olivia Sudjic

Violence always came too easy to you, that's the problem. It always felt too good. Remember the first time you trod on an ant, and with an infant stamp made the moving still, the present past? Wasn't that a sickly sweet epiphany? Such power in your feet and at your fingertips such temptation! It would take some act of charity to give all that good stuff away. You'd need to be something greater that just another invention of a spiteful god. — Stephen Kelman

The first time I walked alone, thirteen, I was terrified. A twig snapped under my shoe; my heart revved wildly. I'd walked these sidewalks a thousand times with my mom, yet I was scared by all her fears. Don't talk to strangers, walk quickly past parked cars, look both ways, all ways, always. Be alert. There was so damn much to remember to stay safe. — Aspen Matis

Memories separated in time are often recalled side by side-there's an emotional connection that has nothing to do with the diary dates and everything to do with the feeling.
Remembering isn't like visiting a museum: Look! There's the long-gone object in a glass case. Memory isn't an archive. Even a simple memory is a cluster. Something that seemed so insignificant at the time suddenly becomes the key when we remember it at a particular time later. We're not liars or self-deceivers-OK, we are all liars and self-deceivers, but it's a fact that our memories change as we do.
Some memories, though, don't seem to change a all. They are sticky with pain. And even when we are not, consciously, remembering our memories, they seem to remember us. We can't shake free of their effect.
There's a great-term for that-the old present. These things happened in the past, but they're riding right up front with us every day. (245-6) — Jeanette Winterson

I can no longer hear my voices, so I am a little lost. My suspicion is they would know far better how to tell this story. At least they would have opinions and suggestions and definite ideas as to what should go first and what should go last and what should go in the middle. They would inform me when to add detail, when to omit extraneous information, what was important and what was trivial. After so much time slipping past, I am not particularly good at remembering these things myself and could certainly use their help. A great many events took place, and it is hard for me to know precisely where to put what. And sometimes I'm unsure that incidents I clearly remember actually did happen. A memory that seems one instant to be as solid as stone, the next seems as vaporous as a mist above the river. That's one of the major problems with being crazy: you're just naturally uncertain about things. (9) — John Katzenbach

In memory, you can access something from the past, anything that you've experienced that you remember - it's there. Now, you might have a memento of it in a photograph or in a film or a building or some clothes that you wore. There might be something that connects you to this memory. But all of us are just all caught in this time, whatever that is. — Annie Lennox

I remembered that she had also looked at me in that way in the past, from that remote dream where I made the chair spin on its back legs and remained facing a strange woman with ashen eyes. It was in that dream that I asked her for the first time: 'Who are you?' And she said to me: 'I don't remember.' I said to her: 'But I think we've seen each other before.' And she said, indifferently: 'I think I dreamed about you once, about this same room.' And I told her: 'That's it. I'm beginning to remember now.' And she said: 'How strange. It's certain that we've met in other dreams. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Music is a very good way of thinking about time. A note only moves you because you remember the one before, and you're waiting for the next ... Each one only means something wrapped in a bit of the past and the future. — Francois Lelord

She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she'd read, novels, biographies, occasional books, about music and art - she could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were things people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did. Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight, as vague and unrecapturable as something seen in the rain from a passing vehicle; looked at directly it vanished altogether. Sometimes there were atmospheres, even the rudiments of a scene; a man in an office looking over Regent's Park, rain in the street outside - a little blurred etching of a situation she would never, could never, trace back to its source in a novel she had read some time, she thought, in the past thirty years. — Alan Hollinghurst

The particular aspect of time that I'm interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is different from the future. We remember the past but we don't remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can't turn an omelet into an egg. — Sean M. Carroll

Often when we connect with our values, we realise that we've been neglecting them for a long time and this can be very painful. But remember, this is not an excuse to beat yourself up! ('What a hypocrite I am! I say I value doing all these different things, yet I'm not doing any of them! I'm pathetic!') All of us lose touch with our values from time to time. Dwelling on those times is pointless because there's nothing we can do to change the past. What's important is to connect with our values here and now and to use them to guide and motivate our current actions. So if your mind does start beating up on you, simply thank it. — Russ Harris

It's rooted in things that maybe older people or people my age remember as being rock music. But at the same time, I don't think we're stuck in the past or retro. I think we've tried to push ourselves and experiment with what we can call Wilco music. — Jeff Tweedy

Perhaps a past of bingeing, restricting, or purging comes back to haunt you from time to time. Maybe you have to fight hard battles against vanity, gluttony, and shame. But with God's saving power, every new day is a gift, an opportunity to detach yourself from tormenting thoughts about food or how you look and to attach yourself to God. Remember, we all hunger for God, more than we hunger for a big bowl of ice cream or a perfect physique. — Kate Wicker

I pushed his hair away from his eyes and took a closer look at his cheek. Maybe there really had been a boy in the street, but I also wouldn't put it past Cole to make one appear,if he had that power.
Jack's eyes opened fully,and he looked at me with half a grin. "You remember the first time I told you I loved you?" His words slurred together.
"Shhhhh.Don't talk.The paramedics are on their way."
"Do you?"
I touched his cheek and he winced. I could almost taste his pain,as if it were a tangible element in the air.I could feel my body hungering for the hurt.It was the first time since I'd Returned that I craved someone else's energy.Even at my lowest point,those last moments in the Everneath,I'd never felt a need for it.Until now.Until I was faced with emotions this strong.
He tilted his head toward me,and I jerked back. The taste in the air became bitter and sweet,a mixture of pain and longing.
"Tell me you remember," he said. "Please. — Brodi Ashton

There can be no intellectual, spiritual, or emotional life without the substratum of memory. Without cognition and awareness of beauty and appreciation of our limited time on planet Earth, humankind's sojourn would be a colorless collage composed of the base acts of a biological mass endeavoring merely to survive. Without the ability to recall striking memories, our emotional life would be stillborn. Absent authentic memories, our life struggles would seem purposeless: human beings would exhibit no capacity to reflect awe when witnessing the bounty of nature's plenitude or be able to take in and express intense reverence for all that is sacred. Without memory, there would not be a dais to support faith or any ability to imagine a God; the concepts of good and evil would be nonexistent; and the past and the future would become less relevant than the choice between salt or pepper, and paper or plastic. — Kilroy J. Oldster

While I principally agree with the NOW movement I also challenge their thinking to a degree. There are plenty of exceptions to the being-present-rule. I have for example worked with cancer patients who were going through very trying times in their therapy, and they couldn't stand to think about the present moment, they needed to envision a better future or remember an enjoyable time from their past to feel slightly better. The present moment was simply a torment. This can be true in a number of other situations where the present moment is simply too awful and painful to intently focus on. — Gudjon Bergmann

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts ... .We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need - not all the time, surely, but from time to time - to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember - the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived. — Frederick Buechner

She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic. — Dennis Lehane

There was a quote he could not quite remember, something about the past being an island surrounded by time. He had missed the last boat to the island. — Joanne Harris

Memory is therefore, neither Perception nor Conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time. As already observed, there is no such thing as memory of the present while present, for the present is object only of perception, and the future, of expectation, but the object of memory is the past. All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals which perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is also that whereby they remember. — Aristotle.

If you wonder how you'll get through this new heartbreak, just think back. Remember all you've been through in the past. And how each time you swore, you'd never get through it. But you did. And look where you're at now. This too shall pass! — Yasmin Mogahed

Everything we think we know, everything we think we see, everything we believe we feel, taste, smell, or hear, everything we "remember" (our pasts), everything we want to happen (our futures), everything that has ever existed or will ever exist, only exists right now. All of these things are nothing more than electric signals being passed through our brains and bodies, right now. It is all energy flowing through us right now. "The past" exists only in our minds. We are the ones who bring it into reality. We are the ones who bring it into the present. We are the ones who make it "real". — Dan Pearce

It's not my story anymore: whenever I speak about the past now, I feel as if I were talking about something that has nothing to do with me. All that remains in the present are the voice, the presence, and the importance of fulfilling my mission. I don't regret difficulties I experienced; I think they helped me to become the person I am today, I feel the way a warrior must feel after years of training; he doesn't remember the details of everything he learned, but he knows how to strike when the time is right. — Paulo Coelho

Dear Bryony,
There are many things I wish I had time to tell you, so I will say just this: These past few
days have been some of the best days of my life. Because of you.
My fervent hope is that you are safe and well as you read this letter. That you will have all
the happiness I wish I could have shared with you. And that you will remember me not as a
failed husband, but one who was still trying, til the very end.
Yours always,
Leo — Sherry Thomas

The mind exists in time, in fact the mind is time; it exists in the past and the future. And remember, time consists of only two tenses, the past and the future. The present is not part of time, the present is part of eternity. — Rajneesh

When we think of the past, we forget the fools and remember the sage. We reverse the process for our own time. — George Boas

Do you remember that piece of footage on the local news, just as the first tower comes down, woman runs in off the street into a store, just gets the door closed behind her, and here comes this terrible black billowing, ash, debris, sweeping through the streets, gale force past the window ... that was the moment, Maxi. Not when 'everything changed.' When everything was revealed. No grand Zen illumination, but a rush of blackness and death. Showing us exactly what we've become, what we've been all the time."
"And what we've always been is ... ?"
"Is living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who's paying for it, who's starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs ... planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There's no uninnocent dead. — Thomas Pynchon

There was a time - when I attained inner peace - when I died, utterly died to myself. I have since renounced my previous identity. I can see not reason to dwell upon my past, it is dead and should not be resurrected. Don't inquire of me - ask me about my message. It is not important to remember the messenger, just remember the message. — Peace Pilgrim

I can remember back to my early tour days when some fellows didn't think I'd last too long. Nothing physical - they said it was my swing. Some said it was too much of a 'muscle swing' to stand the test of time. One fellow predicted I wouldn't get past 30 out there. — Arnold Palmer

Ruminating about the past will get you nowhere. So go ahead and learn from the past whatever you can, and then put it behind you. Remember, there is nothing you can do to change it, but you can use its lessons to improve your future. — Abraham J. Twerski

I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view - I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can't see me at all. — Margaret Atwood

But don't forget that memory is like salt: the right amount brings out the flavour in food, too much ruins it. If you live in the past all the time, you'll find yourself with no present to remember. — Paulo Coelho

We are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, and no amount of education gleaned from our propensity for self-destruction and misguided thinking ever teaches us anything. Not anything that we remember for more than a generation or two.
I think maybe we learn a few things each time that we don't forget. A few things that stick with us. It's just hard to pass those things on to those who come after us because if they didn't live through it, they don't view it the same way we do. If you don't experience something firsthand, it's a lot harder to accept. Terry Brooks, Bearers of the Black Staff, p 89 — Terry Brooks

Just like in the real world, the world in our minds is real. You cannot have both positive and negative thoughts at the same time. Negativity brings us down when we should actually be enjoying life and getting the most out of it. Mental de-cluttering is really about getting rid of your worries, bad memories, fears and disappointments, and starting on a new footing where the past doesn't matter. You decide on what you are going to carry with you to a new and better life. Remember, the more the baggage you carry with you, the more difficult life would be. Focus more on the things you have control over; if you cannot handle something now forget about it altogether. — Jesse Jacobs

I remember that life in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea, time flowed past indifferently above us, hours and days had no meaning. In the beginning our life held a joy and amazement which was newborn every day. Beneath the joy, of course, was anguish and beneath the amazement was fear; but they did not work themselves to the beginning until our high beginning was aloes on our tongues. By then anguish and fear had become the surface on which we slipped and slid, losing balance, dignity, and pride. — James Baldwin

Remember that even if you were to live for three thousand years, or thirty thousand, you could not lose any other life than the one you have, and there will be no other life after it. So the longest and the shortest lives are the same. The present moment is shared by all living creatures, but the time that is past is gone forever. No one can lose the past or the future, for if they don't belong to you, how can they be taken from you? — Marcus Aurelius

Railroad tracks. After the train went past, we'd scramble around trying to find them, and when we did, we'd always marvel at how any trace of engraving would be completely gone. Sometimes the pennies were still hot. I remember almost burning my fingers one time. When I think back on my childhood, it's mostly about small pleasures like that. Katie shrugged, but Jo remained silent, willing her to go on. — Anonymous

When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago
and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail
it's disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you do. It's astonishing to consider all the things from your past that used to happen all the time but (a) never happen anymore, and (b) never even cross your mind. It's almost like those things didn't happen. Or maybe it seems like they just happened to someone else. To someone you don't really know. To someone you just hung out with for one night, and now you can't even remember her name. — Chuck Klosterman

A Rough Guide
Be polite at the reception desk.
Not all the knives are in the museum.
The waitresses know that a nice boy
is formed in the same way as a deckchair.
Pay for the beer and send flowers.
Introduce yourself as Richard.
Do not refer to what somebody did
at a particular time in the past.
Remember, every Friday we used to go
for a walk. I walked. You walked.
Everything in the past is irregular.
This steak is very good. Sit down.
There is no wine, but there is ice cream.
Eat slowly. I have many matches. — Mark Haddon

I remember sitting back, on a local beach I called home; thinking about the wild storms I had already faced, the chaotic thunder I somehow learnt to dance through. This time, remembering it, was different. I had no emotional attachment, I felt free of the past and could quietly seperate who I was with who I am now and this moment was empowering , because had I not faced the greatest disasters with courage, I wouldn't have learnt the mastery of life. My self awakening. — Nikki Rowe

Wow," the empty air finally said. "Wow. That puts a pretty different perspective on things, I have to say. I'm going to remember this the next time I feel an impulse to blame myself for something. Neville, the term in the literature for this is 'egocentric bias', it means that you experience everything about your own life but you don't get to experience everything else that happens in the world. There was way, way more going on than you running in front of me. You're going to spend weeks remembering that thing you did there for six seconds, I can tell, but nobody else is going to bother thinking about it. Other people spend a lot less time thinking about your past mistakes than you do, just because you're not the center of their worlds. I guarantee to you that nobody except you has even considered blaming Neville Longbottom for what happened to Hermione. Not for a fraction of a second. You are being, if you will pardon the phrase, a silly-dilly. Now shut up and say goodbye. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

There are things that you might forget, but you might not clearly forget. Time is the only coin you have to buy the things you want to remember, and to pay for the things you want to leave behind. — Aileene Mhar Jabarani

Whether you need to remember the past or not, It changes nothing but gives the best choice for the future that makes You always to remember your past. — Auliq Ice

As far as I could remember, birthdays had always been filled with love, happiness and joy. They were a time when the whole family would gather in either gigantic or tiny congregations to celebrate the anniversary of a loved one's birth. They were a time to rejoice in the notion that a person had grown one year older (if they wanted to be reminded that is). Finally, birthdays were a time of laughter, when presents would be shared, songs sung and past memories revisited. Adele Rose, Awakening. — Adele Rose

Every time I write about life, I must kill and eat the actual event. I mean to say that my words are scavengers who need to devour lifeless substance if they are to survive as non-fiction. The event is dead, it ceased to be as soon as it happened. The closest I can come to resurrecting the past is to feed my memories to a ravenous swarm of sentences, punctuation and paragraphs. They chew up and digest the things I remember, producing a waste product I think of as an honest account. Reality suffers a second death through this process. False memories, both organic and manufactured, erase the genuine article in order to reassemble the factors into a serviceable construct. True story. — Alex Bosworth

All my life I have been trained by that siren. Before I could walk I knew the siren meant death. It meant somehow the fences had been breached and the Unconsecrated were shuffling among us. It meant grab weapons, move to the platforms and pull up the ladders - even if it necessitated leaving the living behind.
Growing up, my mother used to tell me about how in the beginning, when her own great-great-great-grandmother was a child, that siren would wail almost constantly as the village was bombarded with the Unconsecrated. But then the fences has been fortified, the Guardians had formed and time had passed with the Unconsecrated dwindling to the point that I couldn't remember a time in the past few years when that siren had wailed and it had not been a drill. I know that in my life there have been breaches but I also know that I am very good at blocking out the memories that serve me no purpose. I can fear the Unconsecrated well enough without them. — Carrie Ryan

Think about it. People in the sixteenth century - not to mention in Jesus's time - didn't look like this: perfect skin, perfect hairdos, spotless clothes. These are people who went to the bathroom in the street, for God's sake. There's no way they looked like this. But that's how we're going to remember them. Our alabaster past. When nothing else is left, art will become the truth of the time. Then people will get to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and wonder what happened - how we all became so imperfect. — Julia David Levithan

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends have been evasive about it, at the time. — Margaret Atwood

A man might find for a moment that he was unable to work, but that's exactly the right time to remember his past accomplishments and to consider that later on, when the obstacles has been removed, he's bound to work all the harder and more efficiently. — Franz Kafka

Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever. — Robin Hobb

That I wrote six books about my past is the red herring; nothing I have written has in any way altered the past or healed me clean, so no scar remains. Perhaps the process of writing - being fully in the moment, while I write letter by letter - has soothed me because it's kept me busy. When you're busy, you lack the time to fondle your emotional baggage. And if that sounds too reductive, remember we crawled from the swamp. Simple isn't such a terrible thing to be in this respect. — Augusten Burroughs

The past is now barely present in my thoughts. I believe the main reason for that is our children, since life with them in the here and now occupies all the space. They even squeeze out the most recent past: Ask me what I did three days ago and I can't remember. Ask me what Vanja was like two years ago, Heidi two months ago, John two weeks ago, and I can't remember. A lot happens in our little everyday life, but it always happens within the same routine, and more than anything else it has changed my perspective of time. For, while previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully a bright one, and never boring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here and in a totally different way. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Everyone is lonely, we have to remember that life is to be lived one day at a time. You cannot worry about the past or future. Happiness is in the now. — Claudia Gray