Gone, those times. Closed, sealed, and gone.
The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect.
Imagine spending thousands of dollars to make a sound house look like a wreck. Imagine the frame of mind this implies. Imagine wanting to live so much in the past that you'll pay men carpenters' wages to disfigure your front door.
The past was only tolerable if one felt above it, instead of having to stare stupidly at it aware of one's present impotence.
In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss.
I had heard him say, years ago, that we and our friends and our part of the nation, finding ourselves unable to cope with the problems of the present, had, like a wretched adult, turned back to what we supposed was a happier and a simpler time, and that our taste for reconstruction and candlelight was a measure of this irremediable failure.
It is a sentimental error [. . .] to believe that the past is dead.
Whenever you are on the edge of revealing something important in your past, you stall, voicing suspicions of my questions because you are afraid, because you are reluctant to face your past.
I sincerely don’t have time to mess around with the past, because I’m not sure the past exists anymore.