You cannot see the past that did not happen any more than you can foresee the future.
You can't change what Memphis means to me, what Memphis has meant to me. It's a special place for me. There's no doubt.
You can't un-have an experience. You can deny the experience; you can process it and try to get through it, but you can't change the fact that it happened to you.
I could try to pretend that I didn't care anymore, but it could never be true again. You can't just make yourself matter, and then die, Alaska, because now, I am irretrievably different, and I'm sorry I let you go, yes, but you made the choice.
If you were to ask me would I change anything or could I go back to the past and change anything, I really wouldn't.
Don't Time travel into the past. You can't change it. Today it starts all over again. Every tomorrow is determined by every day.
The past cannot be cured.
Whatever has happened in your past, it's - you can never deny it. I mean, you can never wash what's happened before in your life out of you.
Your past is something you cannot change. You can't live it; it's dead.
the biggest tragedy of life is the utter impossibility to change what you have done
There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.
Can one end anything? A chapter, a paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn't everything one has ever done go on living in spite of subsequent events?
...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
The single difference between films for children and films for adults is that in films for children, there is always the option to start again, to create a new beginning. In films for adults, there are no ways to change things. What happened, happened.
It is what it is. I can't change what's happened to me.
I had to make peace with my past because I can't change it.
The injustices of the past are past. There’s no way to make them up.
Regret doesn't budge things; it seems crazy that the force of all that human want can't amend a moment, can't even stir a pebble.
Life... is not simply a series of exciting new ventures. The future is not always a whole new ball game. There tends to be unfinished business. One trails all sorts of things around with one, things that simply won't be got rid of.
Not even the brightest future can make up for the fact that no roads lead back to what came before - to the innocence of childhood or the first time we fell in love.
In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.
We can revere our past, but we cannot re-capture it.
God cannot alter the past, though historians can.
The future is as irrevocable as an inflexible yesterday.
It is futile to talk too much about the past... like trying to make birth control retroactive.
