Revisiting the Past Quotes

Never go back to a place where you have been happy. Until you do it remains alive for you. If you go back it will be destroyed.

Visiting old haunts is hard on memory. Things shrink, change, and disappear.

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.

I can’t talk about my books. I have written them and tried to forget them. I have written once, and readers have read me many times, no? I try to think of what I wrote, it’s very unhealthy to think about the past, the case of elegies is very sad, as much as the case of complaints.

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

The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.

The past is dead and buried. But I know now that buried things have a way of rising to the surface when one least expects them to.

The retrospective glance is a relatively easy gesture for us to make.

If the right opportunity comes, I'd definitely come back to 130.

Many events seem to happen twice to me; even trifles, unimportant-seeming, recur, as if I were destined to live them again, time reconquered, but with added knowledge and a different outcome.

In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.

Get back to where you once belonged.

Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.

The past is a script we are constantly rewriting.

I did see [in Afghanistan] plenty that reminded me of my childhood. I recognised my old neighbourhood, saw my old school, streets where I had played with my brother and cousins.

I'm a nostalgic person and I really like rehashing and digging around the mental trunks.

As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.

I used to think that I wouldn't change anything from my past, because doing so would inevitably affect who I am now. But considering my current state, I'm thinking it might not be a bad idea to go back in time to fix things.

Life…we understand it differently at different stages. It’s what is interesting about getting older, you realize your relationship with the past is always negotiable. There is a lot of freedom in that, because you realize you can go back to what you did such a long time ago. You can talk with the dead, talk with your lost self, your disappeared self, and you can visit those places again, and understand it differently. That makes a huge difference.

I know you left me once, but I came right back to find you. Even though I like being in your past, you got a bright future behind you.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches. And so I dream of going back to be.

I find that so many times when somebody tries to go back in, it sort of isn't as good and you wish they hadn't done it.

So many times, I will have people tell me what I did when I was younger. There's so much being written [about] the early Beatles period, and even pre-Beatles period. And people will say, "Oh, he did that because that, and that happened because of that." And I'll be reading and think, "Well, that didn't happen" and, "That's not why I did that." Like anyone's history, you remember what went down better than people who weren't there.

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.

When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.