Quotes about the past

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“Things change whether you want them to, or not--unless you are dead. Don't hold so hard to the past that you die with it.”

“Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again.”

“She seems to have had the ability to stand firmly on the rock of her past while living completely and unregretfully in the present.”

“The past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast terrible in-between. But there is still time to seize that one last fragile moment.”

“Don’t let the past ruin your future. (Acheron)
Meaning what, oh great Yoda? (Kyrian)
You take care of the kid. I’ll take care of your patrol tonight. I could use the target practice. (Acheron)”

“Magnus held up a warning finger. "Don't overstep yourself, biscuit," he said, and moved past them, disappearing into the crowd around the portal.
"Biscuit?" said Simon.
"Believe it or not, he's called me that before," Clary said.”

“Shall we never never get rid of this Past?… It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.”

“You've got to use it, the pain. Use it as fuel to move past the torment, to the light at the end of the tunnel”

“Perhaps that’s why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present.”

“I may be fat and ugly, but I'm not stupid. If anyone had ever gotten past my looks, they might've noticed I have a brain.”

“Look not mournfully into the Past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the Present. It is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and with a manly heart.”

“When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable”

“Time wasn't a thing you could divide easily; there was no defined middle or beginning or end. I could pretend to leave the past behind, but it would not leave me.”

“You must learn from your past mistakes, but not lean on your past successes.”

“Clarke's Second Law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

“While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it we do suddenly realize — sometimes with astonishment — how happy we had been.”

“The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited, paralyzed, in the present.”

“Hamish's right arm was around Angus's waist as the two of them tangoed past.”

“We are not just visitors on this planet, it belongs to us just as we belong to her, its past is ours, so is its future.”

“I’ve lived a long time,” Magnus said. “So many years, and no, it doesn’t feel like enough. I won’t lie and say it does. I want to live on—partly because of you, Alec. I have never wanted to live so much as I have these past few months, with you.”

“If you don't pay attention to the past, you'll never understand the future. It's all linked together.”

“You aren't your past, you are probability of your future.”

“We laughed ourselves silly, taking back our shared past, gently, piece by piece.”

“The past is never where you think you left it.”

“I decided it was well past time to take him home and place him in bosom of his family. If you had rather I put him in an orphanage, I fully understand.”

“The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without colour, pain or past.”

“But… what about us? What about the past?" she asks blankly.
"The past isn't real. it's just a dream," I say. "Don't mention the past.”

“It’s in the act of having to do things that you don’t want to that you learn something about moving past the self. Past the ego.”

“Clark," she said softly, "I wouldn't change you for the world.
You're sweet the way you are. The things that'll make you fail
I'll love always-- the living in the past, the lazy days and
nights you have, and all your carelessness and generosity.”

“Lights," I said softly. This had become my favorite word over the past week. In my mind, it had become synonymous with freedom.”

“… can I tell you something…? I don't think you're in love with the past. I think you're scared of the future.”

“As the future ripens in the past,
so the past rots in the future --
a terrible festival of dead leaves.”

“I knew what it was like to lose someone you loved. You didn't get past something like that, you got through it.”

“The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The new order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.”

“Every saint has a past. Every sinner has a future.”

“He believed in himself, believed in his quixotic ambition, letting the failures of the previous day disappear as each new day dawned. Yesterday was not today. The past did not predict the future if he could learn from his mistakes.”

“Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.”

“Father nevver once looked at any woman the way he looked at Mother, with joy and thanksgiving, as if she was a living wish, granted past all hope.”

“Create your future from your future, not your past.”

“Forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself. It's saying, 'You're not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.' It's saying, 'You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.”

“In a society that worships love, freedom and beauty, dance is sacred, It is a paryer for the future, a remembrance of the past and a joyful exclamation of thanks for the present.”

“The past could be jettisoned… but seeds got carried.”

“In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”

“The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.”

“Alcohol is the river we sit on the banks of, contemplating. Sometimes we watch ourselves float past, sometimes we watch ourselves sink.”

“The past was gone. Nothing could change what had already been. Looking back at it, letting its wounds fester, indulging in regret was just a different, slower way to die. The living moved forward.”

“For the first forty days a child
is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths,
a hundred small lessons
and then the past is erased.”

“If only I could visit you as a foreigner goes into a new country, learn the language of you, wander past all borders into every private and secret place, I would stay forever. I would become a citizen of you.”

“You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind.”

“You've faced horrors in these past weeks… I don't know which is worse. The terror you feel the first time you witness such things, or the numbness that comes after it starts to become ordinary.”

“I stood my ground. "You evil scientist are all the same--evil. Count me out."

Fang and I brushed past Mr. God and walked quickly but smoothly to the exit. It was barely noon, and I'd already made a huge enemy.

Dang, I'm good.”

“the past only had whatever power you gave it; life was what you made it and if you wanted something different from what you had, it was up to you to make it happen.”

“Your past is just a story. And once you realize this it has no power over you.”

“You are not your past.”

“The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance; some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.”

“In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.”

“Remember, the past need not become our future as well.”

“I wouldn't ask too much of her," I ventured. "You can't repeat the past."

"Can't repeat the past? he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!”

“It takes a huge effort to free yourself from memory, but when you succeed, you start to realize that you’re capable of far more than you imagined. You live in this vast body called the Universe, which contains all the solutions and all the problems. Visit your soul; don’t visit your past. The Universe goes through many mutations and carries the past with it. We call each of those mutations a ‘life,’ but just as the cells in your body change and yet you remain the same, so time does not pass, it merely changes.”

“Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.”

“In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagines past”

“Everyone has a past, but that's just it--it's in the past. You can learn from it, but you can't change it.”

“The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.”

“I do not laugh; I do not cry;
I'm sweating out the will to die.

My past is sliding down the drain;
I soon will be myself again.”

“Promise me no promises,
So will I not promise you:
Keep we both our liberties,
Never false and never true:
Let us hold the die uncast,
Free to come as free to go:
For I cannot know your past,
And of mine what can you know?”

“I never had intimate friends, and the few who came close are in New York. By which I mean they're dead, because that's where I suppose condemned souls go in order not to endure the truth of their past lives.”

“Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.”

“Like walking through a door. Our relationship immediately attained a sepia tone: the past.”

“The past is a candle at great distance: too close to let you quit, too far to comfort you.”

“Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.”

“The past can be a terrible weight bound to you by an unbreakable chain. You can drag it with you, forever looking over your shoulder at what holds you back. Or you can let it go and move forward. It’s your choice.”

“When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her.”

“A Poem from Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Grown-up

Was it for this I uttered prayers,
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half-past eight?”

“I don’t live in either my past or my future. I’m interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you’ll be a happy man. Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we’re living now.”

“Now that the real and the imagined had collided, he wondered if she, like he, longed for the past, for the normal. He wondered if normalcy was something, like vision or silence, you didn't realize was precious until you lost it.”

“It was very pleasant to savor its aroma, for smells have the power to evoke the past, bringing back sounds and even other smells that have no match in the present. -Tita”

“It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn't matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over.”

“When we wallow in guilt, remorse, and shame over real or imagined sins of the past, we are disdaining God's gift of grace.”

“I bet you never thought the hardest part of finding your ‘saviorʹ would be getting her mom to let her stay out past curfew.”

“A poem by Margot Bickel

A little peace
within the last hours of the almost bygone day
a little silence
between the days
so that the nascent yesterday does not get in the past
and tomorrow is lived for today”

“The time is now, the place is here. Stay in the present. You can do nothing to change the past, and the future will never come exactly as you plan or hope for.”

“I will fight any battle for you, crush any adversity. Because you are mine, beautiful girl. I love you so madly that the past before you feels sane…”

“There's the life you live and the life you leave behind. but what you share with someone else - especially someone you love - that's not just how you bury your past. It's how you write you future.”

“Your past is my Future.”

“When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.”

“I regret everything because it has just finished, and already when I was twelve, I lamented the time that had gone by. Even in the best of spirits, it's always been as though I wrestle with the present in a vain effort to stop its becoming the past.”

“The past was gone and the future had yet to unfold, and he knew he should focus his life on the present…yet his day-to-day existence suddenly struck him as endless and unbearable.”

“Show me a person who doesn't have a past and I'll show you a boring bastard”

“Don't think of what's past!" said she. "I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what tomorrow has in store?”

“He was a man without a past, whose future was the imminent grave and whose present was a bitter fever of living.”

“the mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future”

“The past was always there, lived inside of you, and it helped to make you who you were. But it had to be placed in perspective. The past could not dominate the future.”

“The past has been a mint Of blood and sorrow. That must not be True of tomorrow.”

“One has not lived until one has carried a sixty-pound dog down a sweeping flight of stairs at half-past V in the morning.”

“You know that old phrase ‘Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it’? Well, I think those who remember the past are even worse off.”

“Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance. Good-by is short and final, a word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to the future.”

“Those who have hurt you in the past cannot continue to hurt you now unless you hold on to the pain through resentment.”

“Sundown yellow moon I replay the past
I know every scene by heart they all went by so fast”

“It was the last that remained of a past whose annihilation had not taken place because it was still in a process of annihilation, consuming itself from within, ending at every moment but never ending its ending.”