Quotes about the past

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“There had been certain romantic interludes in the past that had included galloping across the desert at night; but he had never abducted any woman whose enthusiastic support for such a plan had not been secured well in advance.”

“Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.”

“Some people feel like they don't deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.”

“There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we'd lived in different rooms.”

“It's best to be ruthless with the past.”

“The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.”

“Best not to mix the past with the present. The present paints the past with gold. The past paints the present with lead.”

“It's History that's caused all the troubles in the past.”

“It is important for people to know that no matter what lies in their past, they can overcome the dark side and press on to a brighter world.”

“And we danced, on the brink of an unknown future, to an echo from a vanished past.”

“Night falls fast. Today is in the past.”

“Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.”

“Maybe the past is like an anchor holdong us back. Maybe you have to let go of who you were to become who you will be.”

“Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.”

“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve regardless of how many times you may have failed in the past or how lofty your aims and hopes may be.”

“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.”

“The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.”

“But it's our curse and our blessing to remember the past and to know there's a future.

—Charlie”

“Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality… One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.”

“Occasionally we all do wrong things from right motives. Only time can prove us right or wrong. The past is the past. Nothing can change it now, and who is to say that it was all wrong, anyway?”

“I wasn't just the madwoman in the attic--I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me.”

“I don't know why no one ever thought to paste a label on the toilet-tissue spindle giving 1-2-3 directions for replacing the tissue on it. Then everyone in the house would know what Mama knows.”

“If you have a past with which you feel dissatisfied, then forget it, now. Imagine a new story for your life and believe in it. Focus only on the moments when you achieved what you desired, and that strength will help you to get what you want.”

“I had to cease to mourn what could never be and make the most of what was possible. And I would begin doing that by trying to mend the hurts of the past.”

“To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.”

“The vision is really about empowering workers giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.”

“Some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of romance is dead. The age of chivalry is never past, so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.”

“The present no matter what I brought couldn’t change the past. The Past was set and sealed.”

“His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.”

“Hours and days and months and years go by; the past returns no more, and what is to be we cannot know; but whatever the time gives us in which we live, we should therefore be content.”

“Always choose the future over the past. What do we do now?”

“A story can be new and yet tell about olden times. The past comes into existence with the story.”

“No matter how quiet and conformist a person’s life seems, there’s always a time in the past when they reached an impasse. A time when they went a little crazy. I guess people need that sort of stage in their lives.”

“Looking at the past is like lolling in a rocking chair. It is so relaxing and you can rock back and forth on the porch, and never go forward.”

“For me, the release was a spot in time with no past and no future. Just the extraordinary simplicity of a moment— the kind of moment that has a funny way of making a person believe that life and love can last forever.”

“The past can't be changed, can it? It can just be forgiven.”

“A quarter past three," she exclaimed, catching sight of the bedside clock. "What a time to be drinking tea!"
"Anytime," Harold told her, "is time to be drinking tea.”

“He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.”

“These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me.”

“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”

“I was of the opinion that the past is past, and like all that is not now it should remain buried along the side of our memories.”

“We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past.”

“The past can be escaped only by embracing something better.”

“The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play.”

“Rising from the past, my shadow
Is running in silence to meet me.”

“Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.”

“When your're both finished trying to frighten each other away with the sordidness of your pasts, can you help me, please?”

“Those who can forget the past are way ahead of the rest of us.”

“Evident in every small act of kindness, it was love as a verb. Love that made me feel more complete than I had ever felt in my glamorous, Jimmy Choo filled past.”

“How
long did it take for a past to die?”

“While we are alive we should sit among colored lights and taste good wines, and discuss our adventures in far places; when we are dead, the opportunity is past.”

“No matter how much time has passed, these things still affect us and the world we live in. If you don't pay attention to the past, you'll never understand the future. It's all linked together.”

“Always remember the words of Descartes: The reading of all good books is like conversion with the finest men of the past centuries.”

“Yet I have come to believe that while the past is unchangeable, our perceptions of is are malleable…”

“I would die for you. You know that. I would die without you. If it were not for you, I would be dead a hundred times over these past five years.”

“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.”

“The past is history written in stone that can't be altered. The future is transitory and never guaranteed. Today is the only thing you can alter for certain. Make the most of it.”

“But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.”

“You couldn't erase the past. You couldn't even change it. But sometimes life offered you the opportunity to put it right.”

“They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.”

“Was life like that? You could look ahead to the future or back to the past, but the present moved too quickly to absorb.”

“Living was a dangerous past-time, and often quite painful—but there was also such joy in living, such beauty, things that one would otherwise never see, never experience, never know. The risk of pain and loss was a part of living.”

“One cannot let the events of one's past murder one's future.”

“Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.”

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

“It’s what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.”

“.. nothing in your past can change how I feel about you. And God knows I’m no saint.”

“If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.”

“The past is just something that's over.”

“That was a long time ago, but it's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.”

“Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?

She had shaken her head slowly.

Men and women who can't get over their past… That's what ghosts are.”

“Jewels, lies, slips of paper, dried flowers, memories of thing long past, useless quotations, idle hands, beads, buttons, and mischief.”

“The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything ins pace int he past, some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines.”

“It is myself I have never met whose face is pasted on the underside of my mind”

“I loved her for so long. Our past trails behind us like a comet's tail, the future stretched out before us like the universe. Things happen. People get lost and love breaks.”

“You can't forget the things you did in the past, or you'll never learn from them.”

“Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?”

“View your life with KINDSIGHT. Stop beating yourself up about things from your past. Instead of slapping your forehead and asking, “What was I thinking,” breathe and ask yourself the kinder question, “What was I learning?”

“we are product of our past but we don't have to be prisoners of it.”

“What could be duller than past history!' Therese said, smiling. 'Maybe futures that won't have any history.”

“Everything which is done in the present, affects the future by consequence, and the past by redemption.”

“We don’t have to destroy the library of the past. We just need to give it a face-lift.”

“Even if we no longer have much in common, we would have always had the past, which, in some ways, is just as important as the present or future. It is where we come from, what makes us who we are.”

“… why bother remembering a past that cannot be made into a present?”

“As his mother said, once you started worrying about the future, you started obsessing about the past.”

“And then there was Jeremiah. When I looked at Jeremiah, I saw past, present, and future. He didn’t just know the girl I used to be. He knew the right-now me, and he loved me anyway.”

“Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different, it's accepting the past for what it was, and using this moment and this time to help yourself move forward.”

“It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”

“The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolour”

“Sometimes I think I live more closely to the past than the present.”

“Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.”

“Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past—the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.”

“The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.”

“You seemed so far away," Miss Honey whispered, awestruck.

"Oh, I was. I was flying past the stars on silver wings," Matilda said. "It was wonderful.”

“A man who denies his past is a man who truly denies himself a future, for he refuses to know himself, and to deny knowledge of oneself is to stumble through life as handicapped as the blind mute.”

“I am fading away. Slowly but surely. Like the sailor who watches his home shore gradually disappear, I watch my past recede. My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory.”

“It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.”

“When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life.”

“no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And then one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”