“THE best way to suppose what may come, is to remember what is past.”

Variant: After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?
Source: The Bonesetter's Daughter

Source: Nineteen Minutes

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 310

Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (28 May 1934); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

In a 1960 letter to Natalie Barney, as quoted in Paris Was a Woman (1995) by Andrea Weiss, p. 173 http://www.case.edu/artsci/engl/VSALM/mod/brandelmcdaniel/index/library.htm

Source: Batman: The Killing Joke

St. 4
The Tower (1928), Sailing to Byzantium http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1575/
Context: Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Cowboy in the Jungle
Song lyrics, Son of a Son of a Sailor (1978)

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 80
Context: Can no way be found by which every man may be assured of what, let us remember, Tolstoy always had, a wife and children, a good bed, a safe and warm sheltering roof, proper clothes, some leisure and peace for the improvement of the mind, a few books and pictures, a little music, and best of all, no fear for his old age and no dread of want for himself or his loved ones?... Such a way was found in the communism of the early Christians.