Lauren Oliver Quotes

The past is just something that's over.

I guess I should have forgotten about it ages ago, but forgetting isn't something I'm very good at.

I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.

Forget the suffering You caused others. Forget the suffering Others caused you. The waters run and run, Springs sparkle and are done, You walk the earth you are forgetting. Sometimes you hear a distant refrain. What does it mean, you ask, who is singing? A childlike sun grows warm. A grandson and a great-grandson are born. You are led by the hand once again. The names of the rivers remain with you. How endless those rivers seem! Your fields lie fallow, The city towers are not as they were. You stand at the threshold mute.

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

But where are the snows of yester year?

The past is over.

The past has nothing more to teach us. Then why not let it be …. We must look ahead …. Unless we learn to forget, we will be turned into a pillar of salt.

Events have moved on, yet some people still keep talking about the past.

I think we all agree, the past is over.

All the things that are in the past are in the past.

It is all falling indelibly into the past.

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire.

Don't think about what you've left behind.

That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.

The past is a closed door.

I was looking at the photographs and I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories.

The past cannot survive in your presence. It can only survive in your absence.

Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.

She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn't. There was a house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain. When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me something, tell me anything.

Time, where did you go? / Why did you leave me here alone? / Wait, don't go so fast / I'm missing the moments as they pass