unresolved past Quotes

I can't go back. The past won't go away in this family.

I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.

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 past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it. People gather bundles of sticks to build bridges they never cross. People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.

I think...she said finally, "that all of us have got our ghosts.

Far too often, when we think we are frightened by mystery, the fact is that we are haunted by history.

There is nothing worse, is there," she said, "than a past that has never been fully dealt with. One can convince oneself, that it is all safely in the past and forgotten about, but the very fact that we can tell ourselves that it is forgotten proves that it is not.

But she knew that no matter what beauty lay behind, it must remain there. No one could go forward with a load of aching memories.

The book says we may be through with the past but the past ain't through with us.

I understand better than she'd imagine that history is indelible. You can mask it; you can patch it smooth and clear; but you always know what's hidden underneath.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

History isn't through with me yet.

We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic - now mercifully stilled, thank God - might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion as it had before.

It makes it hard to get over a certain period of your life when you are constantly revisiting it every night.

What's become a big theme in my music is my dad as a narrative character. I never had the opportunity to understand our relationship in a more adult capacity. The unknown is great material for any creative outlet.

I wonder if I can write this history, or if on every page there will be some sneaking show of a bitterness I thought long dead. I think myself cured of all spite, but when I touch pen to paper, the hurt of a boy bleeds out with the sea-spawned ink, until I suspect each carefully formed black letter scabs over some ancient scarlet wound.

Something had been buried that was not yet dead.

An unresolved past erodes beauty in the present.

The present is burthened too much with the past.

Your past is always your past. Even if you forget it, it remembers you.

History is an insistent force: the past is what put us where we are. the past cannot be put behind until it is settled with.

In the aftermath of September 11, you can't - as Tony Blair was so fond of suggesting - draw a line under historical events. They don't go away. They come back.

Even though you've given up a past it hasn't given you up. It comes uninvited - and sometimes half welcome.

The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. I understand this. Nonetheless, I sometimes find it hard to bear.

We often live in the past a lot more than we probably realize.