Past Quotes - Page 14

Everything that is past is either a learning experience to grow on, a beautiful memory to reflect on, or a motivating factor to act upon.

Denis Waitley

I still preserve those relics of past sufferings and experience, like pillars of witness set up in travelling through the valve of life, to mark particular occurrences. The footsteps are obliterated now; the face of the country may be changed; but the pillar is still there, to remind me how all things were when it was reared.

Anne Brontë

When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which the young applaud the most insignificant improvements … while remaining heedless of the world’s barbarism. I don’t say things have got worse; I merely say the young wouldn’t notice if they had. The old times were good because then we were young, and ignorant of how ignorant the young can be.

Julian Barnes

Experience," which is just a euphemism for heartache and heartbreak, failed love and false promises, for every time you told yourself This is the real thing and Finally I've found my way home only to end up lost in a muck or lying across rickety train tracks, praying for deliverance and not knowing if that would mean getting run over or being spared; "experience," which is a neutral word that most people know only means something good on a resume, a term that in the rest of life is more like a criminal rap sheet full of mishaps that cannot be expunged, this indelible quality made more frightening because there are no authorities keeping track, no one is forcing you to remember these things, it is all your own fault, it is only you who cannot forget; "experience," which is supposed to be the playground and peep show and life-size labyrinth of adolescence, which can, when it occurs at the right time in life...if it is delivered in moderate and judicious measure...make you a more capable lover and friend, spouse and partner.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Who am I? I am who I say I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest— where you want to erect a museum. Don't hoard the past, Astrid. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.

Janet Fitch

Smartass Disciple: Master, I want to be the better me by forgetting my past.Master of Stupidity: If you just forget it, how would you measure you're better?

Toba Beta

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The past lies beneath the surface, intransigent truth. Remembered or not, what we say and do remains, always.

Meredith Hall

The past is dead and buried. But I know now that buried things have a way of rising to the surface when one least expects them to.

Dan Simmons

It was no good to look back, to apologize for what had happened, or to wonder what could have been different.

Lily Blake

The past that Southerners are forever talking about is not a dead past--it is a chapter from the legend that our kinfolks have told us, it is a living past, living for a reason. The past is a part of the present, it is a comfort, a guide, a lesson.

Ben Robertson

She'd cried over a broken heart before. She knew what that felt like, and it didn't feel like this. Her heart felt not so much broken as just ... empty. It felt like she was an outline empty in the middle. The outline cried senselessly for the absent middle. The past cried for the present that was nothing.

Ann Brashares

There's no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can't re-create what's over.

Chuck Palahniuk

But you must stop playing among his ghosts -- it's stupid and dangerous and completely pointless. He's trying to lay them to rest here, not stir them up, and you seem eager to drag out all the sad old bones of his history and make them dance again. It's not nice, and it's not fair.

Patricia A. McKillip

I'm a century old, an impossible age, and my brain has no anchor in the present. Instead it drifts, nearly always to the same shore. Today, as most days, it is 1962. The year I discovered love.

Meg Rosoff

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

William Maxwell

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

Nathaniel Hawthorne

It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing "How High the Moon" on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could ever improvise the dialogue.) The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished. It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.

Joan Didion

One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.

Oscar Wilde

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.

Zelda Fitzgerald

It’s not easy remembering the good times.

Cecelia Ahern

It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas.

Christopher Fowler

Into my heart an air that killsFrom yon far country blows:What are those blue remembered hills,What spires, what farms are those?That is the land of lost content,I see it shining plain,The happy highways where I wentAnd cannot come

A.E. Housman

Sometimes, I think one should only live in the present. The past is only a heavy burden to carry with you. And yet… it’s so hard to let them go… to forget… to move ahead…

Danielle Steel

Tell me your past, my beloved, for a man is his past, and is to be known by it.

James Stephens

You shouldn’t never regret something that made you smile

Bei Maejor

In the past, I always used to be looking for answers. Today, I know there are only questions. So I just live.

Sarah Brightman

Remembrance of the past kills all present energy and deadens all hope for the future

Maxim Gorky

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.

Chuck Palahniuk

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

Harriet Beecher Stowe

In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points', one can surely only recognise such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.

Kazuo Ishiguro

If you don’t deal with the past, the past deals with you.

Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson

All I trust is the past. Things that have ended can't betray me.

Novala Takemoto

A ghost from her past, part of a world to which she no longer belonged but had never stopped missing.

Catherine Anderson

We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.

Alfred North Whitehead

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.

Dave Pelzer

No human can bury their past indefinitely. It’s only a matter of time before you crack.

K.A. Tucker

If it’s over, then don’t let the past screw up the rest of your life.

Nicholas Sparks

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

Patricia Briggs

The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.

Émile Zola

The 'what should be' never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no 'what should be,' there is only what is.

Lenny Bruce

She needs a new journal. The one she has is problematic. To get to the present, she needs to page through the past, and when she does, she remembers things, and her new journal entries become, for the most part, reactions to the days she regrets, wants to correct, rewrite.

Dave Eggers

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

Chuck Palahniuk

Learn from the past, but don’t live in the past.

Steve Maraboli

These things...they are who you are. They brought you here. To this day. You didn't give me a chance to understand that ever the unattractive parts of you, the messy parts, were something I could accept.

Laura Dave

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.

Janet Fitch

My past is trying to catch up to me and I must continue run from it. It's the only way I can live.

Nicole Sobon

There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez

You can't change where you came from, but you can change where you go from here.

Sarah Addison Allen

It's best to be ruthless with the past.

Stephen King

If my twelve-year-old self, of whom I had grown rather fond, thinking about him, were to reproach me: 'Why have you grown up such a dull dog, when I gave you such a good start? Why have you spent your time in dusty libraries, catologuing other people's books instead of writing your own? What had become of the Ram, the Bull and the Lion, the example I gave you to emulate? Where above all is the Virgin, with her shining face and curling tresses, whom I entrusted to you'- what should I say?I should have an answer ready. 'Well, it was you who let me down, and I will tell you how. You flew too near to the sun, and you were scorched. This cindery creature is what you made me.'To which he might reply: 'But you have had half a century to get over it! Half a century, half the twentieth century, that glorious epoch, that golden age that I bequeathed to you!''Has the twentieth century,' I should ask, 'done so much better than I have? When you leave this room, which I admit is dull and cheerless, and take the last bus to your home in the past, if you haven't missed it - ask yourself whether you found everything so radiant as you imagined it. Ask yourself whether it has fulfilled your hopes. You were vanquished, Colston, you were vanquished, and so was your century, your precious century that you hoped so much of.

L.P. Hartley

He held her close enough to kiss, close enough to whisper the most important secrets in the world, and he spoke to her as he would have wanted some good angel to speak to his family, to his own shivering young soul, long ago and in a land far away.

Cassandra Clare

What's done, is done

William Shakespeare

If I look at my old lyrics, they seem to be full of rage, but empty. There was an emptiness in my life.

Green Day

I often laughed, and you often gave me a dissatisfied look, till you pressed me to unfold my past before you as if it were a roll of pictures. It was then I felt respect for you. Because you unreservedly showed me your resolution to catch something alive in my being, and to sip the warm blood running in my body, by cutting my heart. At that time, I was still living, and did not want to die. So I rejected your request, promising to satisfy you some day. Now I am going to destroy my heart myself, and pour my blood into your veins. I shall be happy if a new life can enter into your bosom, when my heart has stopped beating.

Sōseki Natsume

When you understand, that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.

Chuck Palahniuk

When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.

Stephen King

I had my chance.' He said it, retiring from a lifetime of wanting. 'I had my chance, and sometimes in life, there are no second chances. You look at what you have, not what you miss, and you move forward.

Jamie Ford

Just as a snake sheds its skin, we must shed our past over and over again.

Gautama Buddha

…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future.

Chaim Potok

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Past Quotes - Page 14

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