Laura Miller Quotes

Ghosts don't haunt people--their memories do.

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

Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them.

The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory.

We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic - now mercifully stilled, thank God - might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion as it had before.

The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.

You probably wouldn't remember. I probably couldn't forget.

Memory is a wonderful thing if you don't have to deal with the past.

The past was so past it hurt.

He who forgets will be destined to remember.

I didn't dare think of the future; the past was still happening.

I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield) “But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.

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

One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.

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

If the living are haunted by the dead, then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes.

She was so busy forgetting, she couldn't take a single step into the future.

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

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

The Past is such a curious Creature To look her in the Face A Transport may receipt us Or a Disgrace-.

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.'

Maybe before you die, it's your ghosts you see.

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.

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