The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.

For Earth is but a tombstone

The past is a bucket of ashes

Idle relics of the past. Things that let us imagine we’ve lived, when nothing else remains.

The past was like a handful of sand you thought you were squeezing tightly, but which had already run out through the cracks between your fingers. Memory was a river that had run dry long ago, leaving only scattered gravel in a lifeless riverbed.

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.

Memory, in widow's weeds, with naked feet stands on a tombstone.

The past was like a handful of sand you thought you were squeezing tightly, but which had already run out through the cracks between your fingers. Memory was a river that had run dry long ago, leaving only scattered gravel in a lifeless riverbed. He had lived life always looking out for the next thing, and whenever he had gained, he had also lost, leaving him with little in the end.

The past is a ghost, the future a dream and all we ever have is now.

The past was like a handful of sand you thought you were squeezing tightly, but which had already run out through the cracks between your fingers.

The past is a ghost, the future is a dream, all we ever have is now.

The past is devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards.

Out whole civilization was a cemetery where Jesus Christ and Socrates, Mozart and Haydn, Dante and Goethe were but indecipherable names on moldering stones; and the mourners who stood round affecting a pretense of sorrow would give much to believe in these inscriptions which once were holy, or at least to utter one heart-felt word of grief and despair about this world that is no more. And nothing was left them but the embarrassed grimaces of a company round a grave.

The past is a ghost, the future is a dream, and all we ever have is now.