Past Quotes - Page 13

You cannot see the past that did not happen any more than you can foresee the future.

By living exclusively for the present, we let ourselves be hemmed in by an ocean of death. Conversely, by reviving the past, we enlarge our living space.

Amin Maalouf

To positively discriminate in favour of groups that have been negatively discriminated against in the past.

Ben Elton

..the past kept pricking at me and I knew that all the elements of those nineteen days in July were astir within me, like phlegm in an attack of bronchitis, waiting to come up. I had kep them buried all these years, but they were there, I knew, the more complete, the more unforgotten, for being carefully embalmed. Never, never had they seen the light of day; the slightest stirring had been stifled with a scattering of earth.My secret- the explanation of me- lay there. I take myself much too seriously, of course. What does it matter to anyone what I was like, then or now? But every man is important to himself at one time or another; my problem had been to reduce the importance, and spread it out as thinly as I could over half a century. Thanks to my interment policy I had come to terms with life, I had made a working -working was the word - arrangement with it, on the one condition that there should be no exhumation. Was it true, what I sometimes told myself, that my best energies had been given to the undertaker's art? If it was, what did it matter? Should have I acquitted myself better, with the knowledge I had now? I doubted it; knowledge may be power, but it is not resilience, or resourcefulness, or adaptability to life, still less is it instinctive sympathy with human nature; and those where qualities I possessed in 1900 in far greater measure that I possess them in 1952.Prologue, page 16

L.P. Hartley

[The past] has a way of hanging around, demanding we understand it and weave it into ourselves so that we can go on.

Margaret Coel

(A) trip to the attic is an excursion into history, and...all over the world the present unravels beneath the stored detritus of the past; that's what attics are for.

Valerie Martin

Had I known how sweet they wereI would have saved more of these memories

Richard L. Ratliff

When you put a log on the fire, the light and heat you see is, in a literal sense, the decades of sunshine that tree basked in over its lifetime.

Peter Brannen

In books too, as well as in music, she courted the misery which a contrast between the past and present was certain of giving.

Jane Austen

Always make sure that the PAST is a Previous Action Successfully Terminated and not a Permanent Application of Stressful Trials.

Charbel Tadros

I am a typical example of Western Jew. This means I don't have a moment of peace, that nothing has come easily to me, not just the present and the future, but even the past, that thing that each man receives as his birth-right: even that I have to conquer, and perhaps that is the hardest task.

Franz Kafka

Do you know who your grand grand grand grand grand father is? Probably you don’t! If you want to know your very distant past, just look at yourself because you are the accumulated past, you are the ancient river coming from the valleys of the far past!

Mehmet Murat ildan

I realize that I don’t know where to start. Not because I’m unsure of my story, but because I’m not sure why I feel compelled to tell it in the first place. What can be achieved by unearthing the past?

Nicholas Sparks

While he spends all of his time trying to remember, I spend all of my time trying to forget.I don’t want to remember how it feels to love him.I want to forget everything in this world that reminds me of him.

Colleen Hoover

We go to the past to lay the blame - since the past can't argue. We go to our past selves to account for our present miseries.

Glen Duncan

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

Richelle Mead

The past influences everything and dictates nothing.

Adam Phillips

Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal—the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to routine?

Roger Zelazny

Our personal past is only available to us now through black-and-white film, it's a medium for communication with the dead, including our dead selves, the way we used to be, which is why we're drawn to it.

Frank Lentricchia

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield)“But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.

John Irving

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

Bret Easton Ellis

While they talked they remembered the years of their youth, and each thought of the other as he had been at another time.

John Williams

Delving into the past had unveiled a cruel lesson - that in the book of life it is perhaps best not to turn back pages; it was a path on which, whatever direction we took, we'd never be able to choose our own destiny.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The past was filling the room like a tide of whispers.

Ross Macdonald

The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past.

Will Durant

The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.

Hilary Mantel

The past is fractal premonition, infinite to the eye but nothing to be built on . . .

Lawrence Krauser

It may be possible to forget our past but our past is not going to forget us.

Francesca Marciano

Most of us assume that human beings have free will. However, . . . [we] are very much conditioned by our species, culture, family, and by the past in general. . . . It is rare for a human being to have free will. . . . (140)

Ravi Ravindra

There is a way to look at the past. Don't hide from it. It will not catch you if you don't repeat it.

Pearl Bailey

The distance to the corner shops of childhood becomes unfathomable, immeasurable; the candy bars have changed. And change has changed.

Ilse Aichinger

The great times were never as great as they seem in the rearview mirror.

Pat Benatar

Dead voices, lost sounds, forgotten noises, vibrations lockstepping into the abyss and now too distant ever to be recaptured!...What sort of arrows would be able to transfix such birds?

Villiers de L'Isle-Adam

To forget the past so easily seems scarcely loyal to oneself. I am so selfishly absorbed in my present self that I have grown not to care a damn about that ever increasing collection of past selves- those dear, dead gentlemen who one after the other have tenanted the temple of this flesh and handed on the torch of my life and personal identity before creeping away silently and modestly to rest.

W.N.P. Barbellion

There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

Joan Didion

When I moved, I unearthed the diaries I kept for ten years. I sat and went through them and they were a worthless burden to own. People will say it's tragic I threw them out, but I know it isn't.

Bill Callahan

And it is clear to Evan, now: the difference between what is and what has been done; the present and the past. He sees that what he does and who he is isn't based on the past unless he wants it to be... No. That is the past, which has been seen differently through many different eyes and has become hazy and unclear, like a pond when stirred with a stick. Only the present moment is clear and free from prejudice.

Garth Stein

(M)uch as we might imagine we can leave the past behind, it has a nasty way of pressing its hoary old face against the window just as we were sitting down to the feast.

Valerie Martin

What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you're so wrecked it's hard to believe you ever were a child?

Mitch Albom

Not watching the path where his legs took him, he walked on because he knew he had to walk ahead, leaving his past behind.

Faraaz Kazi

I don't know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination.

Jodi Picoult

It is unthinkable in the twentieth century to fail to distinguish between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be prosecuted and what constitutes that "past" which "ought not to be stirred up.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

To live meant feeding my former self to my current self.

Cameron Conaway

If you have ever felt hopeless hang on The night you’re enduring may seem long but there is joy coming in the morning. Incredible changes are going to take place in your life as you begin to relinquish your past and renew your present.

Sue Augustine

So, yes, I will marry you. Someday. If you'll have me," he said modestly."Of course I will, you idiot," I said with a shriek, and threw myself into his arms.

Eilis O'Neal

by now you've already formed your own impression. you believe that an act committed a lifetime ago defines a man, or you believe that a person's past has nothing to do with his future. you think i am either a hero, or a monster. maybe knowning more about circumstances will make you think differently about me, but it won't change what happened twenty-eight years ago.

Jodi Picoult

In half hour my mother has managed to give me what my father couldn't: my past.

Jodi Picoult

The present grows within the boundaries of the past.

Simon Van Booy

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

Frederick Buechner

In the New Year, never forget to thank to your past years because they enabled you to reach today! Without the stairs of the past, you cannot arrive at the future!

Mehmet Murat ildan

Withdraw, like a turtle, into a hard yet harmless shell, ornamented with beautiful memories of the past.from the book 'I Know Who You Are!

Fatima Masood

Every time I hold your hand in the night and look at that star, I remember the fact that it is millions of light years away from us, we are looking at its past and it doesn't exist anymore and I always end up feeling, what if we both are made up of the dust of the same star we are staring at.

Akshay Vasu

The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.

Sebastian Faulks

Haven't you noticed, too, on the part of nearly everyone you know, a growing rebellion against the present? And an increasing longing for the past? I have. Never before in all my long life have I heard so many people wish that they lived 'at the turn of the century,' or 'when life was simpler,' or 'worth living,' or 'when you could bring children into the world and count on the future,' or simply 'in the good old days.' People didn't talk that way when I was young! The present was a glorious time! But they talk that way now. For the first time in man's history, man is desperate to escape the present. Our newsstands are jammed with escape literature, the very name of which is significant. Entire magazines are devoted to fantastic stories of escape - to other times, past and future, to other worlds and planets - escape to anywhere but here and now. Even our larger magazines, book publishers and Hollywood are beginning to meet the rising demand for this kind of escape. Yes, there is a craving in the world like a thirst, a terrible mass pressure that you can almost feel, of millions of minds struggling against the barriers of time. I am utterly convinced that this terrible mass pressure of millions of minds is already, slightly but definitely, affecting time itself. In the moments when this happens - when the almost universal longing to escape is greatest - my incidents occur. Man is disturbing the clock of time, and I am afraid it will break. When it does, I leave to your imagination the last few hours of madness that will be left to us; all the countless moments that now make up our lives suddenly ripped apart and chaotically tangled in time.Well, I have lived most of my life; I can be robbed of only a few more years. But it seems too bad - this universal craving to escape what could be a rich, productive, happy world. We live on a planet well able to provide a decent life for every soul on it, which is all ninety-nine of a hundred human beings ask. Why in the world can't we have it? ("I'm Scared")

Jack Finney

Sometimes, Miss Jarmond, it's not easy to bring back the past. There are unpleasant surprises. The truth is harder than ignorance

Tatiana de Rosnay

Sitting on the floor, I'd replay the past in my head. Funny, that's all I did, day after day after day for half a year, and I never tired of it. What I'd been through seemed so vast, with so many facets. Vast, but real, very real, which was why the experience persisted in towering before me, like a monument lit up at night. And the thing was, it was a monument to me.

Haruki Murakami

There is nothing worse, is there," she said, "than a past that has never been fully dealt with. One can convince oneself, that it is all safely in the past and forgotten about, but the very fact that we can tell ourselves that it is forgotten proves that it is not.

Mary Balogh

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

Salman Rushdie

Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.

W.H. Auden

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Past Quotes - Page 13

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