Claudia Rankine Quotes

Your past is just that, the past, a place within your psyche with no more reality to it then the picture of a castle on a postcard is made from stone.

The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed?

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 .

Emptying the ashtrays was very expressive of myself. i just lump everything in a great heap which i have labeled ‘the past,’ and having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, i am ready to continue.

The past is dead except for the life you give it

Let the past be content with itself, for man needs forgetfulness as well as memory.

But how carve way i' the life that lies before, If bent on groaning ever for the past?

I think it's foolish to think that if you've done something for so long, you can kind of delete it out of your memory bank or delete every emotion attached to it. I knew when I retired what that meant.

I'm ready to deal with somebody else's baggage. I'm sick of mine.

I don't really want to leave anything in life behind. We have bad experiences, we have difficult experiences, but if you leave everything behind, you have no past.

The past doesn't haunt us, we haunt the past.

I refuse to let the past find me here.

One can never change the past, only the hold it has on you.

Our most merciless enemy is our past.

Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it.

Though the past haunt me as a spirit, I do not ask to forget.

The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.

It would add much to human happiness, if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which the remembrance is at once useless and afflictive, that the mind might perform its functions without encumbrance, and the past might no longer encroach upon the present.

The past is one evil less and one memory more.

You can’t move ahead until you bury the past.

This is what I have come to know: Our past is never passed and there is no such thing as moving on. But there is this telling and there is such a thing as passing through.

No looking back. Life goes one way only, and whatever opinions you hold about the past having nothing to do with anything but your own damn weakness. Nothing changes what already happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don't.

He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.

I don't rehash the past. It's my baggage. That's all. I accept things as they are.

All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.