“Paris is a place in which we can forget ourselves, reinvent, expunge the dead weight of our past.”

“We are products of the past and we live immersed in the past, which encompasses us. How can we move towards the new life, how create new activities without getting out of the past and without placing ourselves above it? And how can we place ourselves above the past if we are in it and it is in us? There is no other way out except through thought, which does not break off relations with the past but rises ideally above it and converts it into knowledge.”

“We're not very good as a species at looking into the future. It's much easier to look back at the past. We can edit out the bits we don't like, reinvent ourselves. But there's nothing about the future we can edit or reinvent. Most people are prisoners of the future just as much as they are prisoners of their genes.”

“Our past can control today and tomorrow only to the degree we allow it. The past should not be a place where we dwell but a place from which we learn all we can and then move on.”

“We cry for ourselves, don't we? Not for the dead. The dead are past caring.”

“We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.”