Quotes about the past

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“No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.”

“We are not held back by the love we didn't receive in the past, but by the love we're not extending in the present.”

“Night falls fast.
Today is in the past.

Blown from the dark hill hither to my door
Three flakes, then four
Arrive, then many more.”

“The past does not have to be your prison. You have a voice in your destiny. You have a say in your life. You have a choice in the path you take.”

“Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”

“People don't get to our ages without having pasts. I'm more interested in the future.”

“Its more fun to think of the future than dwell on the past.”

“If you have a statue in the city centre you could go past it every day on your way to school and never even notice it, right. But as soon as someone puts a traffic cone on its head, you've made your own sculpture.”

“some of us have so much defeat in our past that we feel we lost the race before we knew it started.”

“The seeds of the past bear fruit in the present.”

“A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age - regardless of how they look on the outside - pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.”

“With each passing moment I'm becoming part of the past. There is no future for me, just the past steadily accumulating.”

“History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past”

“But this was what happened when you didn't want to visit and confront the past: the past starts visiting and confronting you.”

“I don't want my past to become anyone else's future.”

“People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.”

“What remains of your past if you didn't allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories.”

“In your past lies your future. [Acheron Parthenopaeus]”

“The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.”

“For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.”

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to compute it.”

“The older you get the more you live in the past”

“No use dwelling on the past. What you do tomorrow and the next day and the day after that is what matters.”

“Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.”

“It has been a mistake living my life in the past. One cannot ride a horse backwards and still hold its reins.”

“You may have created my past and screwed up my present, but you have no control over my future.”

“I'm 65 years old. Everyday the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.”

“It is not as important how we start (our past), but how we finish.”

“Are you okay? (Simone)
No, I’m in ecstasy. I blew straight past okay the minute you touched me. (Xypher)”

“You're always free to change your mind
and choose a different future, or a different past.”

“When we put things off until some future-probably mythical-Laterland, we drag the past into the future. The burden of yesterday's incompletions is a heavy load to carry. Don't carry it.”

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

“There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.”

“You can't look back - you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.”

“People want pretty much the same things: They wanted to be happy. Most young people seemed to think that those things lay somewhere in the future, while most older people believed they lay in the past.”

“The past is dead. Tomorrow will become whatever decision you make it. ~ Acheron.”

“What is the past but what we choose to remember?”

“The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future.”

“Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different.”

“Your past is not your potential”

“Even people capable of living in the past don't really know what the future holds.”

“I didn't remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become.”

“A good friend is a connection to life - a tie to the past, a road to the future, the key to sanity in a totally insane world.”

“He was jealous of her future, and she of his past.”

“It struck me then how much the past - not just the past but history and family - was like the ocean tide. It was always the same ocean, but the waves made it fresh and new each time.”

“What makes you walk past thirty-thousand people without a second glance, and then you look at the thirty-thousandth-and-first person and know you'll never take your eyes off her again?”

“God is in the résumé-building business. He is always using past experiences to prepare us for future opportunities.”

“I've come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying
the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I
now enjoy.”

“I’ll put it out there: I am scarred by the nostalgic indicipherability of my own desires; I an engulfed by the intimidating unknown, pushed through darkness and dragged down by the irretrievable past sweetness of my memories.”

“How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible…”

“The future for me is already a thing of the past.”

“Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it”

“Everything is beautiful. We have all this beauty in the world and all we have to do is reach out and touch it, it is all there and all ours for the taking." -- Cecilia to Henry Chinaski, liberty taken changing past tense to present tense (173)”

“The past is gone-the future is not come. And we are here together, you and I.”

“There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.”

“You list the dead. You tell the stories of the past. You write about the catastrophes and the massacres. What about the living, Finnikin? Who honors them?”

“Sometimes we have to face the things that hurt us most. Maybe you won’t heal till you do. You haven’t yet.” They both knew that was true. “You can’t move ahead until you bury the past.”

“I didn't dare think of the future; the past was still happening.”

“The city glitters past us with its sharp edges, reminding us of how tiny, how weak, how totally unimportant we are.”

“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.”

“Your thoughts and beliefs of the past have created this moment, and all the moments up to this moment. What you are now choosing to believe and think and say will create the next moment and the next day and the next month and the next year.”

“You can't go back, Ever. You can't change the past. It just is." I squint, having no idea what she's talking about. But just as I start to ask, she shakes her head and says, "This is our destiny. Not yours.”

“A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.”

“… I begin with songs. They provide a sort of skeleton grammar for me to flesh out. Songs of longing for future tense, songs of regret for past tense, and songs of love for present tense.”

“I refuse to let the past find me here.”

“After all, the wrong is done. It is past and cannot be changed. We have only the present and the future upon which to move forward.”

“Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.”

“Immigration policy should be
generous; it should be fair; it should
be flexible. With such a policy we
can turn to the world, and to our own
past, with clean hands and a clear
conscience.”

“The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.”

“I mean, I knew I wasn't a nice person, but what did I do in my past life to deserve this? I must have hit a bus full of nuns while driving a stolen car on my way to selling drugs to schoolchildren!”

“America was different. America was a river, roarng along, unmindful of the past. I could wade into this river, let my sins drown to the bottom, let the waters carry me someplace far. Someplace with no ghosts, no memories, and no sins.”

“Doesn't surprise me," Nana snorted. "I wouldn't put anything past your late husband."
"He's not dead, Nana."
Nana sighed. "Hope springs eternal.”

“In every heart there is a room,
A sanctuary safe and strong,
To heal the wounds from lovers past,
Until a new one comes along”

“If I have to have a past, then I prefer it to be multiple choice.”

“The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand”

“The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it or to escape what is bad in it but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.”

“Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.”

“I had come to regard him as a loner with no real past and a future so vague there was no sense talking about it.”

“There are few phrases that annoy me more than I won't bite. The only line that pisses me off faster is when some drunk, ham-faced dude in a bar sees me trying to get past him and barks: Smile, it can't be that bad! Yeah, actually, it can, jackwad.”

“If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.”

“You are unnerving the hell out of me, Valkyrie."
"oh" she frowned, petting her bat fitfully " I must have misread the future for the past." she shrugged. "It happens.”

“The future would end up finding out the truth about the past.”

“No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.”

“We wanted to define her, to wrap her up as we did each other, but we could not seem to get past "weird" and "strange" and "goofy." Her ways knocked us off balance.”

“I may have been dead for the past hundred and fifty years, Susannah,… but that doesn't mean I don't know how people say good night. And generally, when people say good night, they keep their tongues to themselves.”

“The past is no further away than the last breath you took.”

“So when you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there's always madness. Madness is the emergency exit.”

“Sometimes, Ms. Lane,” he said, “one must break with one’s past to embrace one’s future. It is never
an easy thing to do. It is one of the distinguishing characteristics between survivors and victims.
Letting go of what was, to survive what is.”

“It's a kind of arrogance to be so certain you're past redemption.”

“I'm not a very nostalgic person. I don't really look at the past and summon up regrets, or self-congratulations, it just is not a mechanism that operates very strongly in me. So I neither have regrets nor occasions for self-congratulations.”

“Inner peace can be reached only when we practice forgiveness. Forgiveness is letting go of the past, and is therefore the means for correcting our misperceptions.”

“But you only get so many do-overs in this life, so many chances to, if not change your past, alter your future.”

“The past is for learning from and letting go. You can't revisit it. It vanishes.”

“Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.”

“They say I'm old-fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast!”

“All the events of your past have formed a lens, or paradigm, through which you see the world. And since no one's past is exactly like anyone else's, no two people see alike.”

“Only love can heal the wounds of the past. However, the intensity of our woundedness often leads to a closing of the heart, making it impossible for us to give or receive the love that is given to us.”

“I take responsibility only for the future, not the past. The past can't hurt you the way the future can.”

“You knew me. You knew that person, but you don't know the person I'm trying to become… You are not your past!”