Alice Munro Quotes

One of the reasons why old people make so many journeys into the past is to satisfy themselves that it is still there.

It is in our nature to travel into our past, hoping thereby to illuminate the darkness that bedevils the present.

Haven't you ever wished that you could steal back just a few hours of your past?" she asked softly. "That's all I want... just a little taste of what might have been.

The past is like a handful of dust. It filters through your fingers, disappearing little by little. I wish, for one day, I could go back. In another life I would do things differently.

My own literary interest is more about excavating the past, or sensing the past inside the present. This requires all kinds of exclusions and sleights of hand. There's an admittedly antiquarian flavor to it, even though there's enough of the present included to lull the reader.

It's funny how close the past is, sometimes. Sometimes it seems as if you could almost reach out and touch it. Only who really wants to?

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

If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.

Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!

Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees ... one's happiness, one's reality?

Cassandra wondered at the mind's cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life's end, her grandmother's head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was it always this way? Did those with passage booked on death's silent ship always scan the dock for faces of the long-departed?

The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.

Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.

We're captive on the carousel of time, we can't return we can only look behind.

I drift along, thinking about the past a great deal. The past is so reliable, so delightful, and the best place to live. I end up there quite often, you know; it's very comfortable and dependable.

If we could all take a sober look at our history, then we would no longer see this nostalgic attitude to the Soviet past that predominates among the less affected part of our society.

Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!" He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

O, call back yesterday, bid time return

The past scampers like an alley cat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter.

I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.

Time travel is always more magical somehow when you go into the past. Traveling into the future is something you do, every day. You're just not going to get very far. So, I rather like the past travel.

History is a state of yearning. I yearn for Kay Lake throughout this entire thing. There's an essay I've written where I talked about living in the past. There's a whole motif in the book of then and now. And I lived there.

He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past

History could hover, like a faint perfume or a memory stamped on the back of one's eyelids.

I want to look back. To look over my shoulder and see the Stop sign with huge reflective letters, pleading with Hannah. Stop!