Reading sheds light on our dark path ahead. By traveling into the past, I enhance my grasp of the present.

We observe things in the present and then, okay, we're assuming that that's always happened in the past, and we're going to figure out how this happened. You see? There is a difference between what you observed and what happened in the past.

At least within our own consciousness, the past is malleable and flexible, constantly changing as our recollection reinterprets and re-explains what has happened.

Interpretations of the past are subject to change in response to new evidence, new questions asked of the evidence, new perspectives gained by the passage of time.

The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.

It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out.

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

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.

Present and past—what had Dr. Orme said about that? The light was most fully in the present when, flaring up, it met John's eye directly. Whatever else he saw must have been lit up before and now shone only within his own eye—a light of the past.

Touching the present moment, we realize that the present is made of the past and is creating the future.

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

History does not repeat itself, but our reading of history shapes our perception of the world and our vision of how to change it. With the collective rendering of woman's legacy still to come, we will reckon a course that transforms our reading of the human experience and allows us to navigate through hitherto unknown waters. (p 151)

We go through the present blindfolded... Only later, when the blindfold is removed and we examine the past, do we realise what we've been through and understand what it means.

It is more than just memory, I think, that binds us to the past. The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around...