All MARGARET ATWOOD Quotes about “Past”

“This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath.”
“He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.”
“I would not change [my past work] anymore than I would airbrush a photo of myself.”
“The past is a closed door.”
“When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
“I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.”
“While in a vintage restaurant..."the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.”
“It had helped to keep her sane, that writing. Then, when time had begun again and real people had entered it, she'd abandoned it here. Now it's a whisper from the past. Is that what writing amounts to? The voice your ghost would have, if it had a voice?”
“A movie about the past is not the same as the past.”
“All writers must go from now to once a upon a time; all must go from here to there; all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past.”
“I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.”
“History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.”

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