Quotes about the past

page 11

“The hardest part of living is making peace with your past. Most of all, it’s making peace with yourself.”

“The centuries are sprinkled with rare magic
with divine creatures
who help us get past the common and extraordinary ills that beset us”

“It is all connected Dominick," she said. "Life is not a series of isolated ponds & puddles; life is this river you see below, before you. It flows from the past through the present on it's way to the future.”

“But the past cannot be changed, and we carry our choices with us, forward, into the unknown. We can only move on.”

“it’s only by studying the mistakes of the past,” Lucien
said mildly, “that we can even have a future”

“Nevertheless, the book gave Jack a feeling he had never had before, that the past was like a story, in which one thing led to another, and the world was not a boundless mystery, but a finite thing that could be comprehended.”

“You could give me the past,“ he said a little sadly. “But Alec is my future.”

“Don't judge the past by the standards of today. It won't work. They're incompatible.”

“Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.”

“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”

“You are the only young man that I know of who ignores the fact that the future becomes the present, the present the past and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don't plan for it!”

“How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?”

“He tapped my chest. 'Happy is here.' He tapped his own chest. 'Here.'
I looked down past my chin. 'Inside?'
'Inside.'
It was getting crowded in there. First angel. Now happy. It seemed there was more to me than cabbage and turnips.”

“The Three Oddest Words

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.
When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.
When I pronounce the word nothing,
I make something no nonbeing can hold.”

“Emptying the ashtrays was very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labeled ‘the past,’ and having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue.”

“You think that just because it's already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue.”

“I will practice coming back to the present moment… not letting regrets and sorrow drag me back into the past or letting anxieties, fears, or cravings pull me out…”

“I’ve learned that everything happens for a reason,” the yogi Krishnan told him. “Every event has a why and all adversity teaches us a lesson… Never regret your past. Accept it as the teacher that it is.”

“Wizard's Seventh Rule
Life is the future, not the past.”

“Nico di Angelo has warned them: the House of Hades would stir their worst memories, make them see things and hear things from the past Their ghosts would become restless.”

“It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.”

“I don't think anyone ever remembers what they were really like as kids. Adults think they do, but they don't. Photos and videos don't capture the real you, or bring back to life the person you used to be. You have to return to the past to do that.”

“O little one,
My little one,
Come with me,
Your life is done.

Forget the future,
Forget the past.
Life is over:
Breathe your last.”

“Accept what you are able to do and what you are not able to do. Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it. Learn to forgive yourself and to forgive others. Don't assume that it's too late to get involved.”

“The past doesn't matter. People cling to it because it allows them to ignore the present.”

“I just don't see the point in beating myself up. I think it's more productive to concentrate on being a better person right now than punishing myself for who I was in the past.”

“The past is the father of the present.”

“Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.”

“Past tears are present strength.”

“All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his arms was the only necessity.”

“Because photos are testimony that someone did live. A reminder of past we may have loved or hated. A piece of our lives.”

“Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.”

“We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.”

“because the past was always around her and might return at any time. It prowled the world searching for her, and she knew it was growing angrier at every passing day.”

“Scraps of Magic:
These are little scraps of magic & when you paste them together you get a memory of something fine & strong, she said. Sometimes it takes till you're 40 to see it though.”

“The Past is the textbook of tyrants; the Future is the Bible of the Free.”

“Regret is useless in life. It's in the past. All we have is now.”

“Oh, for Thor's sake…" said Hiccup. "I thought that was just a story…"
"Stories come from somewhere," said the witch. "The past haunts the present in more ways than we realise.”

“Now think deeply.
What have you done with your life over the past year?
How do you feel inside?”

“Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate,
Whose table once a Guest, but not
The second time, is set.
Whose crumbs the crows inspect,
And with ironic caw
Flap past it to the Farmer’s corn;
Men eat of it and die.”

“In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me.”

“People long to go backward in their imagination as well as forward. We don't wish simply to exist forever in some future; we wish to have existed in some distant past.”

“When you begin to realize that your past does not necessarily dictate the outcome of your future, then you can release the hurt. It is impossible to inhale new air until you exhale the old.”

“Time goes from present to past.”

“Because this is what happens when you try to run from the past. It just doesn’t catch up, it overtakes … blotting out the future.”

“You can’t help being young, but it’s past time that you stopped being stupid.”

“You have to open up to the world and learn optimism… Contentment with the past, happiness with the present, and hope for the future. Learned optimisim.”

“Everything in the gospel teaches us that we can change if we need to, that we can be helped if we truly want it, that we can be made whole, whatever the problems of the past.”

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”

“If we have to be cat burglars, I'm going to see what' to steal in the fridge."
We're trying to find evidence she's the poisoner. Just a thought before you start putting random things in your mouth." Ruth shrugged and walked past Val.”

“The past can't hurt you anymore. Not unless you let it. They made you into a victim, Evey. They made you into a statistic. But, that's not the real you. That's not who you are inside.”

“the greatest Americans
have not been born yet
they are waiting patiently
for the past to die”

“I was heading off to my new world. But I was taking a part of my past, and the future, along with me for the ride.”

“The past is the past. You cannot change it, but you can learn from it.”

“The blade must past threw the fire, else it breaks.”

“Sometimes you met someone that changed the pattern, who wormed their way past the cracks in your heart, caulked them up, sealed themselves in, and stayed there. Sometimes they did it by insisting you meet them at every step, as Jamie had done to me.”

“Children, Never look Back!" and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory. for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.”

“Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility…. Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.”

“There was something so heavy about the burden of history, of the past. I wasn't sure I had it in me to keep looking back.”

“It is amazing the quality of human beings that are in this world if we can just get past people not dressing the way we want them to dress.”

“God is more powerful than anybody's past, no matter how wretched. He can make us forget - not by erasing the memory but by taking the sting and paralyzing effect out of it”

“Awareness requires living in the here and now, and not in the elsewhere, the past or the future.”

“No one can lose either the past or the future - how could anyone be deprived of what he does not possess?… It is only the present moment of which either stands to be deprived: and if this is all he has, he cannot lose what he does not have.”

“There's a huge seal called 'impossibility' pasted all over this world. And don't ever forget that we're the only ones who can tear it off once and for all.”

“The great courageous act that we must all do, is to have the courage to step out of our history and past so that we can live our dreams.”

“They had no past. They had no future. They just were.”

“I'd rather be thin than famous
but I'm fat
paste that in your broadway show”

“You didn't get past something like that, you go through it -- and for that reason alone, I understood more about her than she ever would have guessed.”

“Kim was more than a little inclined to snarl at him, but in the past few days she had learned that snarling at Mairelon did little good. He simply smiled and corrected her grammar.”

“History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.”

“You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.”

“A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

“Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”

“Here we are. Maybe I should warn you before we enter…(Asmodeus)
(Jericho stepped past him and threw open the door.)
Or maybe not. Let’s just barge in and be surprised, shall we? (Asmodeus)”

“Sometimes you are aware when your great moments are happening, and sometimes they rise from the past. Perhaps it's the same with people.”

“Adrian suddenly made an abrupt turn onto a side street we'd nearly driven past. I jerked upright as he clipped the curb.
"What are you doing? Think about your tires!”

“Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough”

“That's what literature is. It's the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them!”

“I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.”

“Do not dwell on past failures or it will ruin your future.”

“In a futile attempt to erase our past, we deprive the community of our healing gift. If we conceal our wounds out of fear and shame, our inner darkness can neither be illuminated nor become a light for others.”

“The past is always with us, for it feeds the present.”

“I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.”

“The only time people turned to watch her go by was when she hurtled past them as she fell.”

“I allowed myself to suffer how jarringly destructive the present feels and how fragile the past.”

“The heart may freeze, or it can burn. The pain will ease and I can learn. There is no future, there is no past. I live this moment as, my last.”

“ice contains no future, just the past, sealed away. As if they're alive, everything in the world is sealed up inside, clear and distinct. Ice can preserve all kinds of things that way- cleanly, clearly. That's the essence of ice, the role it plays.”

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

“Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.”

“When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended.”

“Life is wonderful, so revel in its beauty. Be all you can be, and let go of the past. It is nothing but shadows.”

“When the past has passed from you at last, let go. Then climb down and begin the rest of your life. With great joy.”

“There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.”

“When the past dies, there is mourning, but when the future dies our imaginations are compelled to carry it on.”

“The past is obdurate.”

“We need the courage to learn from our past and not live in it.”

“if it's true your life flashes past your eyes before you die, then it is also the truth that your life rushes forth when you are ready to start to truly be alive.”

“We have a talent for disguising greed under the cloak of freedom. As for past acts of depravity, we prefer to ignore those. Progress, after all, means to look ever forward, and whatever we have trampled in our wake is best forgotten.”

“Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.”