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The Past Quotes

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The Past Quotes

“We can't leave the past in the past because, the past is who we are. It's like saying I wish I could forget English. So, there is no leaving the past in the past. It doesn't mean the past has to define and dominate everything in the future. The fact that I had a temper in my teens doesn't mean I have to be an angry person for the rest of my life. It just means that I had allot to be angry about but, didn't have the language and the understanding to know what it was and how big it was. I thought my anger was disproportionate to the environment which is what is called having a bad temper but, it just means that I underestimated the environment and my anger was telling me how wide and deep child abuse is in society but, I didn't understand that consciously so I thought my anger was disproportionate to the environment but, it wasn't. There is almost no amount of anger that's proportionate to the degree of child abuse in the world. The fantasy that you can not be somebody that lived through what you lived through is damaging to yourself and to your capacity to relate to others. People who care about you, people who are going to grow to love you need to know who you are and that you were shaped by what you've experienced for better and for worse. There is a great deal of challenge in talking about these issues. Lots of people in this world have been hurt as children. Most people have been hurt in this world as children and when you talk honestly and openly it's very difficult for people. This is why it continues and continues.If you can get to the truth of what happened if you can understand why people made the decisions they've made even if you dont agree with the reason for those decisions knowing the reasons for those decisions is enormously important in my opinion. The more we know the truth of history the more confidently we can face the future without self blame.”

ChildrenRelationshipsFamilyPsychologyChildhoodConfidenceAngerTherapyFamily RelationshipsThe Past
Author:Stefan Molyneux
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“As his boots walked towards the old station, he felt as though he were hallucinating. Scary apprehension increased the beat of his heart and the sweat upon his forehead was cold. The reality of where he stood created a sinking feeling inside of him. An old man everyone called Uncle Tucker once owned this place. His sole existence behind the counter all of the time, day and night. He could have been a creature out of a fairy tale, with his long white beard and equally long white hair. Merlin. The overalls and the ball cap perched upon his head, along with the half-smoked cigar with an endless burning orb positioned in his mouth. It made him a fixture in time. He wondered if Tucker would still be alive. Tucker with his endless stories of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, and flower children. A man that never left a country thousands of miles away where bicycles filled the capital. A man who never left those fields where killing occurred.”

AgeTimeAgingTraumaPtsdVietnam WarThe PastFlashbacks
Book:The Delta Highway
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“The “olden times” are only such in reference to us. The past is rendered strange, mysterious, visionary, awful from this great gap in time that parts us from it, and the long perspective of waning years. Things gone by and almost forgotten, look dim and dull, uncouth and quaint, from our ignorance of them, and the mutability of customs. But in their day—they were fresh, unimpaired, in full vigour, familiar and glossy.”

AntiquityThe PastOld Books
Book:The Plain Speaker: Opinions On Books, Men, And Things [by W. Hazlitt]
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“It was revolting that I had been like that. Shameful. Disgraceful, in the old-time sense of the word. And what was even worse? That I could now see myself so wretchedly clearly. I had changed, I recognized bitterly.I hated that I could see myself as I was. What a terrible thing to know. I would never be able to not know it, to forget it.I didn't see how I could ever forgive River for that.”

The PastNastasyaComing To Terms
Book:Darkness Falls
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“In his book Footsteps (1985), Richard Holmes compared the biographer's act to 'a kind of pursuit, a tracking of the physical trail of someone's path through the past'. What Holmes realized in the course of his own pursuits was that the footstepping biographer never actually reached his subject; only encountered at best the second-order suggestions of their earlier presence: glimpses of afterglow, retinal ghosts, psychic gossamer. 'You would never catch them,' cautioned Holmes, 'no, you would never quite catch them...”

PursuitFootstepsThe PastTrackingBiographer
Book:The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot
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“She lay awake for many hours into the night, among her trunks and trinkets. She glanced over at the neat stacks of materials and toys and opera plumes and said, aloud, "Does it really belong to me?" Or was it the elaborate trick of an old lady convincing herself that she had a past? After all, once a time was over, it was done. You were always in the present. She may have been a girl once, but was not now. Her childhood was gone and nothing could fetch it back.”

The PastReminiscingThe Present Moment
Book:Dandelion Wine
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“In taking a side, I thought uneasily, perhaps I ought to take the long view, the survival of the species as a whole. That was my problem, I thought, I was always thinking at the level of the individual, in this case the rabbit, the grim scene unfolding before me in the garden as the kite pecked at the belly of the poor beast, initiating a gyration in the corpse or almost corpse of the poor rabbit, a kind of organy wobbling. Now what was that that reminded me of? A hanging, tremulous, a doorway and a tidy garden. What happened to one’s past when one got beyond it?”

The PastRabbitKiteTaking SidesSurvival Of The Species
Book:Study for Obedience
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“The one plentiful herds of magazine writers would continue to be culled - by the Internet, by the recession, by the American public, who would rather watch TV or play video games or electronically inform friends that, like, 'rain sucks!' But there's no app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day in a cool, dark bar. The world will always want a drink.”

ChangeTechnologyDrinkingAlcoholSarcasmNew AgeChangesThe PastAmericansElectronicsTvThe FutureBourbonVideo GamesBarRecessionThe InternetElectronic RevolutionElectronic BooksThe PublicThe RecessionA DrinkElectronic Software
Book:Gone Girl
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“I am always a different man; a reinterpretation of the man I was yesterday, and the day before, and all the days I have lived. The past is gone, was always gone; it does not exist, except in memory, and what is memory but thought, a copy of perception, no less but no more replete with truth than any passing whim, fancy, or other agitation of the mind. And if it is actions, words, thoughts that define an individual, those definitions alter like the weather - if continuity and pattern are often discernible, so are chaos and sudden change.”

TruthTodayChangePerceptionThoughtsChaosWordsMemoryDefinitionsYesterdayFancyActionsContinuityWhimThe PastPatternReinterpretationGwynn
Book:The Etched City
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