perception of the past Quotes

How do I know the past is not a fiction conceived to reconcile the difference between my state of mind and the present.

After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!

Memories were moving pictures in which meaning was constantly in flux. They were stories people told themselves.

You think that just because it's already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue.

Once upon a time wasn't as long ago as it used to be.

The past feels distant, even when it's near. The future feels assured, even when it isn't.

The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolour

The past doesn’t exist except as a memory, a mental story, and though past events aren’t changeable, your stories about them are. You can act now to transform the way you tell the story of your past, ultimately making it a stalwart protector of your future.

You change the past when you change the way you see it.

The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.

At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink. What I've chosen, what's happened unchosen, can't be unmade or redone. Poetry, though, is a door that only continues to open. Even the unchangeable past changes inside a poem. Not the facts, but the feeling, the comprehension.

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was"...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.

Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.

One builds one's life in consistency; one invests it with the belief, however unsupported by reality, that one has always been what one is now, that even in one's distant past one could recognize the seed from which this doomed flower has bloomed.

Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

there simply is no way to describe the past without lying. Our memories are not like fiction. They are fiction.

Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

Nevertheless, the book gave Jack a feeling he had never had before, that the past was like a story, in which one thing led to another, and the world was not a boundless mystery, but a finite thing that could be comprehended.

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.