Past Quotes - Page 341

Not to know what happened before you were born is always to remain a child. For what is a man’s life if it is not linked with the life of future generations by memories of the past?

With a Trump administration we don't know enough yet to make predictions, but if past behavior is any indication, I am not encouraged.

Don't feel ashamed for having those feelings and those memories. What happened in the past can't be changed, but they can be a guide for what happens in the future.

When I'm sitting at my computer writing, I really have this fiendish smile on my face. I am not thinking about the past or the future or how it's going to be received. I feel that I'm very lucky that way; I don't carry that particular anxiety around with me. I'm not anxiety-free by any means, but that happens to be one that I've been spared.

Everybody is an expert in giving advice on how you cannot do something. So forget about everybody. And then, when you encounter a hurdle-and I do that every week-view it as an opportunity, not the end of the world. Do whatever you need to do to get past it quickly. If you believe in your dream, you'll definitely get there.

People seem to lose all respect for the past; events succeed each other with such velocity that the most remarkable one of a few years gone by, is no more remembered than if centuries had closed over it.

I don't find that writing about parts of my life had much effect except in some cases to improve my memory. To get into parts of the past I want to recall very vividly, I use a form of directed meditation.

I don't think writers change the past any more than other people do, except in so far as we may mine our lives and change things for fictional use.

The blade must past threw the fire, else it breaks.

If one generation is expected to carry an excessive burden on behalf of another, it will seek by every means to avoid it. It will either demand that past promises are broken, or it will not work, or it will not pay taxes, or the most talented people will leave. Socialist governments which have tried to tax 'till the pips squeak' have ample experience of that.

The Old Guard dies but it never surrenders.

In the presence of grandparent and grandchild, past and future merge in the present.

It's always considered bad taste to comment on a tragedy right when it's happening, but I love when something is considered too soon to talk about because then you can blast past that social censorship to get into something real.

All writers must go from now to once a upon a time; all must go from here to there; all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past.

Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again.

So Crake never remembered his dreams. It's Snowman that remembers them instead. Worse than remembers: he's immersed in them, he'd wading through them, he's stuck in them. Every moment he's lived in the past few months was dreamed first by Crake. No wonder Crake screamed so much.

Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture that caused all those subjected to it to regurgitate in verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast was a ritual item devoured by fetishists in the belief that it would enhance their kinetic and sexual powers. Toast cannot be explained by any rational means. Toast is me. I am toast.

Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as if her feet are not on cement at all but on ice. The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge.

A movie about the past is not the same as the past.

I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.

I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.

Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past—the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

It had helped to keep her sane, that writing. Then, when time had begun again and real people had entered it, she'd abandoned it here. Now it's a whisper from the past. Is that what writing amounts to? The voice your ghost would have, if it had a voice?

While in a vintage restaurant..."the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.