Mignon McLaughlin Quotes

The past is an obdurate stranger that puts as many marks on us as we attempt to impose on it.

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.

The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it. People gather bundles of sticks to build bridges they never cross. People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.

If history is really relevant in today's world, the proposition doesn't command much respect. Perhaps the past is a different country, but if so no one much wants to travel there.

My country has no history, only a past.

That parasite: the past.

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

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 .

The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone.

If we tried To sink the past beneath our feet, be sure The future would not stand.

Don't be so bitter about a bad experience from your past that you miss the opportunities in front of you.

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.

My past is my shadow, it follows me everywhere I go. Well, all those things come from when I had no other choice. They put my back against the wall. I do what I gotta do.

History can't be left to fend for itself. For when it comes to history and beliefs and values, we turn our future on the lathe of the past.

The day before is what we bring to the day we're actually living through, life is a matter of carrying along all those days-before just as someone might carry stones, and when we can no longer cope with the load, the work is done, the last day is the only one that is not the day before another day.

The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.

Some things you can never leave behind. They don't belong to the past. They belong to you.

Sometimes great tunes happen to bad times, and when the bad time is over, not all the tunes get to move on with you.

The truth is that everybody has a past and everybody has an ex.

It occurred to me that there was a story behind the scar -- maybe not as dramatic as the story of my wrists, but a story nonetheless -- and the fact that everyone had a story behind some mark on their inside or outside suddenly exhausted me, the gravity of all those untold pasts.

No matter how far we travel, the memories will follow in the baggage car.

Life is messy, Ren. It's not easy and it's definitely not for the timid. Everyone has a past.

Writing history is a method of getting rid of the past.

Nothing in my life ever seemed to fade away or take its rightful place among the pantheon of experiences that constituted my eighteen years. It was all still with me, the storage space in my brain crammed with vivid memories, packed and piled like photographs and old dresses in my grandmother’s bureau. I wasn’t just the madwoman in the attic — I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me.

If only a man could spit his past out so easily.