Scars exist to show that I existed. I myself don’t have any scars, but every single one of my friends has a healed up knife wound deep in their back.

To be alive at all is to have scars.

Because a scar means you survived. It means you’re tough and hard to kill. It means you lived. A scar is something to admire.

Our scars are the brightest Parts of us.

Never be ashamed of a scar. In the end, scars tell the story of our lives, everything that hurt us, and everything that healed us.

Strange, what brings these past things so vividly back to us, sometimes!

We all bear scars,... Mine just happen to be more visible than most.

Because we embrace our scars more than our healing. [...] We can recall the exact day we got hurt, but who remembers the day the wound was gone?

The marks humans leave are too often scars.

"Scars"

They tell how it was, and how time
came along, and how it happened
again and again. They tell
the slant life takes when it turns
and slashes your face as a friend.

Any wound is real. In church
a woman lets the sun find
her cheek, and we see the lesson:
there are years in that book; there are sorrows
a choir can't reach when they sing.

Rows of children lift their faces of promise,
places where the scars will be.

William Stafford, <i>Americans’ Favorite Poems</i> edited by Maggie Dietz and Robert Pinsky (W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition, November 1, 1999)

Our common experience in fact is the opposite — that the past, far from disappearing or lying down and being quiet, has an embarrassing and persistent way of returning and haunting us unless it has in fact been dealt with adequately. Unless we look the beast in the eye we find it has an uncanny habit of returning to hold us hostage.

You collect scars because you want proof that you are paying for whatever sins you've committed. And I know this because I've been doing the same damn thing for two hundred years. Tell me, do you think you will go to some blessed Afterworld, or do you expect a burning hell? You're hoping for hell — because how could you face them in the Afterworld? Better to suffer, to be damned for eternity and —

Sometimes you could see the scars and sometimes you couldn’t. But everybody had them.

The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.