Faith Ringgold Quotes

I don't watch most of the movies I'm in. Ever. They're like a bad relationship where, after you break up, you don't want to look over all the valentines.

If you're based in two places, on a bad day you see only the disadvantages everywhere. On a bad day, returning to Germany brings back all kinds of spectres from the past.

When something's painful, you just avoid it. Why bother dredging up the past if it's nothing but bad stuff?

But how carve way i' the life that lies before, If bent on groaning ever for the past?

What else does anyone have except for a collection of slightly painful memories?

The past doesn't haunt us, we haunt the past.

You have your wonderful memories," people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

One of the saddest things in life, is the things one remembers.

And on the last day, the bad days become so difficult to recall, because one way or another, she had made a life here, just as I had. The town was paper, but the memories were not. All the things I’d done here, all the love and pity and compassion and violence and spite, kept welling up inside me.

There was something so heavy about the burden of history, of the past. I wasn't sure I had it in me to keep looking back.

We both know what memories can bring / They bring diamonds and rust.

She was so emotional, on the verge of tears. This was what I'd wanted to prevent with all those quick disappearances, the tangledness of farewells and all the baggage they brought with them. But now, looking at Deb, I realized what else I'd given up: knowing for sure that someone was going to miss me. What happened to goodbye, Michael in Westcott had written on my Ume.com page. I was pretty sure I knew, now. It had been packed away in a box of its own, trying to be forgotten, until I really needed it. Until now.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

That was a good time in my life, in spite of having the sensation of floating on a cloud, surrounded by both lies and things left unspoken. Occasionally I thought I glimpsed the truth, but soon found myself once again lost in a forest of ambiguities.

I Sing what was lost and dread what was won, / I walk in a battle fought over again.

Memory is a cruel mistress with whom we all must learn to dance.

That parasite: the past.

Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day; or the agonies which are have their origins in ecstasies which might have been.

Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.

Music revives the recollections it would appease.

I wonder why we hate the past so.

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

I'm so sorry for loving you, I'm so sorry.... But it was such a wonderful dream, my love, such a wonderful dream.

Don’t you just hate nights like that, when you think over every mistake you’ve made, every hurt you’ve received, every bit of meanness you’ve dealt out? There’s no profit in it, no point to it, and you need sleep.