I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

(...) I collected enough fragments of the past to make a reconstruction of it, which must have borne as much relation to the real thing as a mosaic portrait would to the original.

I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view - I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can't see me at all.

you can't change the past, Aunt Lou used to say. Oh, but I wanted to; that was the one thing I really wanted to do

And what has become of Ronette, after all, left behind in the past, dappled by its chiaroscuro, stained and haloed by it, stuck with other people's adjectives?

Sono una profuga del passato, e come altri profughi ricordo le usanze e le abitudini di vita che ho lasciato o sono stata costretta a lasciarmi alle spalle, tutto sembra così strano, da qui, che ne sono ossessionata.

We may call Eurydice forth from the world of the dead, but we cannot make her answer; and when we turn to look at her we glimpse her only for a moment, before she slips from our grasp and flees. As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.

God gave unto the Animals A wisdom past our power to see: Each knows innately how to live, Which we must learn laboriously.