Steve Toltz Quotes

But I had a strong reaction to my first three albums and I struggle with them now, as an adult. It's very much the same as looking at your teenage photos in high school.

I look at the past and I see myself.

That's a part of me going back to what I used to do.

I realized I've spent all my life creating a past.

When I look back at the 1980s I pinch myself. Did I really do all that?

When I look at pictures when I was younger, I do the quintessential cringe.

I suppose I sometimes used to act like I wasn't a human being... Sometimes I look back at myself and remember things I used to say, or my hairstyle, and I cringe.

I go on the Internet and look at old pictures of myself, because it is the best reminder of how far I have come and where I do not want to be.

I find myself thinking more about the past as I get older... maybe because there's just more of it to think about. At the same time, I'm less haunted by it than I was as a younger person. I guess that's probably the ideal: to reach a point where you have access to all of your memories, but you don't feel victimized by them.

In therapy, I see myself in the mirror differently.

It's impossible not to constantly adjust the way you look at yourself.

Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.

We all have appointments with the past.

I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.

If I do not understand myself, the whole complexity of myself, I have no basis for thinking.

The ego is as you think of yourself. You in relation to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them. The self is the whole range of possibilities that you've never even thought of. And you're stuck with you're past when you're stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through.

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.

It is well we cannot see into the future. There are few boys of fourteen who would not feel ashamed of themselves at forty.

My past is everything I failed to be.

Who is that girl I see, staring straight back at me? When will my reflection show who I am inside?

Memories were the markers of the journey through life. It was necessary to know where you had come from. Only then could you know where you were going.

Do you ever wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and think, something's not accurate?

I've looked in the mirror every day for 20 years. It's the same face.

I wandered through the streets thinking of all the things I might have said and might have done had I been other than I was.

I used to think that I wouldn't change anything from my past, because doing so would inevitably affect who I am now. But considering my current state, I'm thinking it might not be a bad idea to go back in time to fix things.