Toni Morrison Quotes

Remembrance of the past kills all present energy and deadens all hope for the future

I putter. I nurse old grudges. I fold origami while nursing old grudges. I think about the past. I wonder if there’s any grudges I should start.

I think a lot about the past, it's true. But at my age, the past is more present than the here and now. And there is not much percentage in the future.

You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.

J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans. IhavemorememoriesthanifIwereonethousandyearsold.

That parasite: the past.

The un-happiest of mortals is that man who insists upon reliving the past, over and over in imagination - continually criticizing himself for past mistakes - continually condemning himself for past sins.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling ,and sewn with rebus threads.Most of the time , the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on .

People who think about the past have no future.

Memory, the priestess, kills the present and offers its heart to the shrine of the dead past.

While to live in the past and think of what was good and beautiful about it amounts to a sort of seasoning of the present, the perennial wait for tomorrow is bound to result in chronic discontent that poisons one's entire outlook.

Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.

I cannot think of a thing that was better in those good old days.

Remembering our past, carrying it around with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it.

Some moments supersaturate, take on almost more than one tiny fragment of time can hold. How...can you hold this sort of memory of someone and at the same time just try to seem normally, regularly, pleased when she comes back to visit for a few days every few years?

It's too easy, you see, to get trapped in the past. The past is very seductive. People always talk about the mists of time, you know, but really it's the present that's in a mist, uncertain. The past is quite clear, and warm, and comforting. That's why people often get stuck there.

The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolour

In a serious sense, wanting to change something from the past doesn't work for me - change something you don't enjoy now rather than regretting it later.

Time moves only forward, never back. We look forward to a moment and then it arrives and an instant later it is gone. Like something on the surface of a river that we reached for but did not touch in time and it carried on, away. You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind.

I keep saying that backwards is all you can see. You can't see front. My wife says, "Stop, you're always in the past." She sees me sort of daydreaming.

I guess I should have forgotten about it ages ago, but forgetting isn't something I'm very good at.

The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and conscience.

Our suffering is caused by holding on to how things might have been, should have been, could have been.

I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.