Julia Gillard Quotes

I feel like I've started a new chapter in my life, and I need to leave the past behind.

This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.

It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.

Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow's joy is possible only if today's makes way for it; that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one.

Everybody thought I was crazy. They thought I should take the money and run. But there was just something special about being a senior at Chapel Hill. I just couldn't leave.

I don't harp on what I could change about the past, because I can't go back and change it. But definitely a lot of things I would change.

It's easy to get rid of things when there is an obvious reason for doing so. It's much more difficult when there is no compelling reason.

Even when I retired, there was part of me that didn't want to retire. But once you decide it's time to move on then you have to stick with it.

The past is but the past of a beginning.

There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.

You have to decide when it is time to move on.

The life of day before yesterday has departed today.

This is going to make me sound really weird and stalkery, but I've bought the aftershaves of all my ex-boyfriends. Sometimes I like to smell them and be like 'aah, that's Charlie... aah that's Dan'.

Dealing with wedding stuff is a bit of a double-edged sword - it seems that divorcees are expected to either burn it all on the front lawn, tears silently coursing down their faces, or keep the stuff, shrine-like, concealed somewhere in their homes.

Throwing things out is one of the most difficult and important things you ever have to do.

You can't go back and alter the past.

I don't really collect anything. I grew up in a family that collected things, and then they'd get sick, and people die, and then they have their basements full of stuff that goes from one box to the next, so I try not to get sentimental with stuff. I just try to collect memories; I guess that would be it.

It's tough for me to move on from places, even though I realize that it's not only necessary but very important to be able to do so.

I don't regret anything, not even leaving Boca because it was the time to do so.

So I said I wanted you to stay, even though nothing could stay the same.

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

Nothing you love is lost. Not really. Things, people—they always go away, sooner or later. You can’t hold them, any more than you can hold moonlight. But if they’ve touched you, if they’re inside you, then they’re still yours. The only things you ever really have are the ones you hold inside your heart.

Outgrowing things we love is never a pleasant process.

In the futile attempts we all make to tidy up our lives and our surroundings, nothing is more difficult than throwing out a book.

She went out and took a last long look at the shabby little library. She knew she would never see it again. Eyes changed after they looked at new things. If in the years to be she were to come back, her new eyes might make everything seem different from the way she saw it now. The way it was now was the way she wanted to remember it.