It is strange indeed to write of your own past. “In those days” I have written ... but I am not at all sure that those days have been changed by time. All my life I believed in the changes I could, and sometimes did, make in a nature I so often didn‛t like, but now it seems to me that time made alterations and mutations rather than true reforms; and so I am left with so much of the past that I have no right to think it very different from the present.

Lillian Hellman, Pentimento, 26