Barbara Grizzuti Harrison Quotes

I'm just fascinated by the past. You know, both by the possibilities it holds and by the complete tyranny of it, the way it sort of keeps you in this stranglehold and makes you want things that you no longer have and you can never get back.

The past can never be erased. It is always going to be there.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

We all have appointments with the past.

The past is a closed door.

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

The past is not a package one can lay away.

I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.

Sentimentality and nostalgia are closely related. Kissing cousins. I have no time for nostalgia, though. Nostalgics believe the past is nicer than the present. It isn't. Or wasn't. Nostalgics want to cuddle the past like a puppy. But the past has bloody teeth and bad breath. I look into its mouth like a sorrowing dentist.

The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.

Pretending the past doesn't exist is as bad as living in it.

The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable.

How easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.

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

She had taken to wondering lately, during these swift-counted years, what had been done with all those wasted summer days; how could she have spent them so wantonly? I am foolish, she told herself early every summer, I am very foolish; I am grown up now and know the values of things. Nothing is ever really wasted, she believed sensibly, even one's childhood, and then each year, one summer morning, the warm wind would come down the city street where she walked and she would be touched with the little cold thought: I have let more time go by.

One may return to the place of his birth, He cannot go back to his youth.

There's no future in our past. Just experience. We want to return to it, but we don't want to close the door on it either.

It's never safe to be nostalgic about something until you're absolutely certain there's no chance of its coming back

A long past vividly remembered is like a heavy garment that clings to your limbs when you would run.

What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.

Time, where did you go? / Why did you leave me here alone? / Wait, don't go so fast / I'm missing the moments as they pass

It's nine o'clock on a Saturday, the regular crowd shuffles in / There's an old man sitting next to me making love to his tonic and gin / He says, 'Son, can you play me a memory?/ I'm not really sure how it goes / But it's sad and it's sweet, and I knew it complete when I wore a younger man's clothes.'

The past is a very determined ghost, haunting every chance it gets.

I'm 65 years old. Everyday the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.

I dream that I have found us both again, With spring so many strangers' lives away, And we, so free, Out walking by the sea, With someone else's paper words to say.... They took us at the gates of green return, Too lost by then to stop, and ask them why- Do children meet again? Does any trace remain, Along the superhighways of July?