It is dreadful to think that behind me my own past is no longer anything but shifting darkness.

The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me... all that's left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears - I shall not find myself.

The past is... much more uncertain—or even falsely reported—than is usually recognized.

The past is a painful memory to me. The past was an ominous nightmare of frustrations, inaction, and a suffering body and flesh.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.

I felt myself still reliving a past which was no longer anything more than the history of another person;

I’ll put it out there: I am scarred by the nostalgic indicipherability of my own desires; I an engulfed by the intimidating unknown, pushed through darkness and dragged down by the irretrievable past sweetness of my memories.

My past is everything I failed to be.

I could not imagine that the future I was walking toward could compare in any way to the past that I was leaving behind.

I now feel it impossible to realize the full extent of the misery which I endured.

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. 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. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.

I found myself within a forest dark,

The past has no wholeness, it has been etiolated by revised explanations of it, trampled over by hindsight - all their lives.

I wish I could change it all. I wish I could.
But I can’t.
Dammit.
Now I know what it’s like to have an indelible past—one that can’t be erased and changed at will. It’s frustrating. It’s maddening. And it makes me wish I had been more careful and thoughtful.