Past Quotes - Page 15

Our past may explain why we're suffering but we must not use it as an excuse to stay in bondage.

Joyce Meyer

This is the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you.

Lauren Oliver

Things without all remedy should be without regard: what's done is done.

William Shakespeare

I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

Margaret Atwood

Those who have hurt you in the past cannot continue to hurt you now unless you hold on to the pain through resentment.

Rick Warren

I've never tried to block out the memories of the past, even though some are painful. I don't understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now.

Sophia Loren

You go on. You set one foot in front of the other, and if a thin voice cries out, somewhere behind you, you pretend not to hear, and keep going.

Geraldine Brooks

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.

Nicholas Sparks

They made a major mistake," he blurted out, "the dumb bastards, when they didn't start by killing you first.""Benjamin Thomas Parish, that was the sweetest and most bizarre compliment anyone's ever given me."I kissed him on the cheek. He kissed me on the mouth."You know," I whispered, "a year ago, I would have sold my soul for that."He shook his head. "Not worth it." And, for one-ten thousandth of a second, all of it fell away, the despair and grief and anger and pain and hunger, and the old Ben Parish rose from the dead. The eyes that impaled. The smile that slayed. In another moment, he would fade, slide back into the new Ben, the one called Zombie, and I understood something I hadn't before: He was dead, the object of my schoolgirl desires, just as the schoolgirl who desired him was dead.

Rick Yancey

It's just hard to see people from your past when your present is so cataclysmically fucked.

Jonathan Tropper

You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Sometimes in order to be happy in the present moment you have to be willing to give up all hope for a better past.

Robert Holden

Fuck the past. This was the present.

Maggie Stiefvater

Even the good things from our pasts still only belonged in the past

Cora Carmack

We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.

Lyndon B. Johnson

The past is never where you think you left it.

Katherine Anne Porter

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

John Banville

You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.

Jane Austen

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.

William Golding

Sooner or later we've all got to let go of our past.

Dan Brown

What's past is prologue.

William Shakespeare

If only. Those must be the two saddest words in the world.

Mercedes Lackey

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

Oscar Wilde

Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you'll find an edge to cut you.

Mark Lawrence

Today expect something good to happen to you no matter what occurred yesterday. Realize the past no longer holds you captive. It can only continue to hurt you if you hold on to it. Let the past go. A simply abundant world awaits. (January 11)

Sarah Ban Breathnach

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

T.S Eliot

A medicine cat has no time for doubt. Put your energy into today and stop worrying about the past.

Erin Hunter

In many cases, people hold on so tightly to their past pains to avoid letting go of the “excuses” and the fear of having to be accountable for their life.

Yvonne Pierre

When a person thinks you are too good for them, they create a wall without even taking a chance. The best life that God has in store for a person is often thrown away because of what he or she thinks they deserve. True love is not the life you had, but the life you never realized you could have.

Shannon L. Alder

It's a tiring game resenting the scars and the fearful memories.

Efrat Cybulkiewicz

We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we're in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back form the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see its like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that...Also watch the flow of music. The melody as its expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence...you wait till later to find out what the sentence means...The present is always changing the past.

Alan W. Watts

Who you are in Christ is far more important and meaningful than whatever has taken place in your past.

Elizabeth George

What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward, the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That's where the interest is. That's where the meaning will be if I find any.

Wallace Stegner

London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.

Anna Quindlen

Use the information you’ve been given as an individual, but NEVER let what you’ve heard or read or experienced in the past prevent you from answering the call on your life. You are responsible for your life. That includes the voice inside you and everything it calls you to do. Don’t ignore that voice to follow rules that don’t fit. When a jacket doesn’t fit anymore, it’s time to donate it. Same principle applies for rules which no longer serve you. You don’t have to curse the rules or condemn them. In fact, there might be someone else who would benefit from them at the exact moment you no longer need them. Just step into all that you can be and all that you can do.

Stephen Lovegrove

There is no shame in having been the woman I was. She made me the woman I am.

Julie-Anne

We lavish more attention onto our past, after its done, than in the making of it. as a result; "What is done" and "Could have been" becomes ruthless killers lurking in the darkness of our consciousness.

Efrat Cybulkiewicz

[…] nobody grows up. Everyone carries around all the selves that they have ever been, intact, waiting to be reactivated in moments of pain, of fear, of danger. Everything is retrievable, every shock, every hurt. But perhaps it becomes a duty to abandon the stock of time that one carries within oneself, to discard it in favour of the present, so that one’s embrace may be turned outwards to the world in which one has made one’s home.

Anita Brookner

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.

Joan Didion

Have compassion for your past. By showing love to the present. Your past was just the portal to now.

Matthew Donnelly

Jesus wastes none of our stories, even our tales of woe. He transforms them into epic adventures where we dare to face our past for the sake of our present.

Mary E. DeMuth

Only one life, it will soon be past,only what’s done for Christ will last.

Elizabeth George

magic can make things happen before you do it. It can make things have happened.

Jo Walton

Emotion is ‘recognition’. When treasured moments are identified in the jungle of our personal history during a visual or aural encounter, we capture magic sparks from our past, arousing flashes of insight and revealing an inner flare. These instants of recognition may kindle enthralling emotion and fulfilling inspiration. (“Those journeys of love”)

Erik Pevernagie

True stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

Siri Hustvedt

From key signature to coda, from downbeat to the sound of life's final fermata, our pasts set the tone for all that was, that is, and that ever would be.

Jamie A. Hughes

Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant…

Alan Lightman

You know the saying a rolling stone gathers no moss? I'm the opposite. I've gathered too much, and when one thing happens, it brings up everything else that's ever been similar to it. I don't just feel things once and then move on. I fell them over and over again, and the only new thing is whatever precipitated the memory of the old, so it never really feels new at all. Everything just gets integrated into one big giant ball...

Jane Devin

Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You'll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I'm still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don't worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.

Frank McCourt

In all memory there is a degree of fallenness; we are all exiles from our own pasts, just as, on looking up from a book, we discover anew our banishment from the bright worlds of imagination and fantasy. A cross-channel ferry, with its overfilled ashtrays and vomiting children, is as good a place as any to reflect on the angel who stands with a flaming sword in front of the gateway to all our yesterdays.

John Lanchester

Memory, instead of being a duplicate, always present before one's eyes, of the various events of one's life, is rather a void from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables ones to resuscitate dead recollections, but even then, there are innumerable little details which have not fallen into that potential reservoir of memory, and which will remain for ever unverifiable.

Marcel Proust

How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at age thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier.Honda felt that his youth had ended with the death of Kiyoaki Matsugae. At that moment something real within him, something that had burned with a vibrant brilliance, suddenly ceased to be.Now, late at night, when Honda grew weary of his legal drafts, he would pick up the dream journal that Kiyoaki had left him and turn over its pages.(...)Since then eighteen years had passed. The border between dream and memory had grown indistinct in Honda’s mind. Because the words contained in this journal, his only souvenir of his friend, had been traced there by Kiyoaki’s own hand, it had profound significance for Honda. These dreams, left like a handful of gold dust in a winnowing pan, were charged with wonder.As time went by, the dreams and the reality took on equal worth among Honda’s diverse memories. What had actually occurred was in the process of merging with what could have occurred. As reality rapidly gave way to dreams, the past seemed very much like the future.When he was young, there had been only one reality, and the future had seemed to stretch before him, swelling with immense possibilities. But as he grew older, reality seemed to take many forms, and it was the past that seemed refracted into innumerable possibilities. Since each of these was linked with its own reality, the line distinguishing dream and reality became all the more obscure. His memories were in constant flux, and had taken on the aspect of a dream.

Yukio Mishima

Sometimes we live too much in the past,remembering what we wished had happened.

Harley King

Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior.

Julian Barnes

What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? What "grace" might have enlightened me? except that of passing time, or of a good cause, encountered on my way?

Roland Barthes

Ever poised on that cusp between past and future, we tie memories to souvenirs like string to trees along life’s path, marking the trail in case we lose ourselves around a bend of tomorrow’s road.

Susan Lendroth

Memories rob us of the present.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

sometimes the past is the best memories you lived ever cause it'll never repeat again

Christine Minasian

If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.

Julian Barnes

For now I sit on my final island of the present as my radius of memory shrinks; lost already are the islands of work, of old friendships...Other islands fade as I brood upon them.

Chuma Nwokolo

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Past Quotes - Page 15

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