The Past Quotes

if you will not always think about the decisions you are taking, you shall always think about the decisions you should have taken in regret, in wonder or in joy. Regrets of the past shall always remain an indelible footprint but the lessons from regrets can always be learned and be used

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Had I known only tells us the regretful stories of yesterday better

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The past lives through us. We are its legacy.

Marty Rubin

But there's a beginning in an end, you know? It's true that you can't reclaim what you had, but you can lock it up behind you. Start fresh.

Alexandra Bracken

Every moment is precious, even the ones behind me that I often reflect upon with a reserved smile. However…I seldom look back, only forward in anticipation of the next greater now.

Carl Henegan

I didn't know the demonsthat walked across your memory.They came from the dustwhen you were at peacein your grave.

Susie Clevenger

The past was just a place where uncontrolled freaks you had never consciously decided to include in your life entered it anyway and staggered around, breaking things.

Alexandra Kleeman

anytime you enjoy the sweet fruits of the tree, remember the dirty roots of the tree

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I keep coming back to certain books, and you—to try to find myself again

John Geddes

VIEW FROM A HILLI am not yet quite over it.I am lying down on top of it.Surveying behind me a wastelandOf dried-up promise.While the lights below twinkleWith dull mocking uncertainty.There isn't much left to look forward to,And the looking forward of the past has been belied.

John Tottenham

Rehashing the past wouldn't change anything. Time to move forward.

Zena Wynn

Where exactly does it come from, I’d like to know, this ineradicable attitude of superiority toward the past? This stubbornly dumb, can’t-kill-it-with-an-ax conviction that we, the now, critically and categorically know better than they, the past. Is it from the mere fact that their future is known to us, that we know what happens? (Nothing good.) It’s much the way we treat small children— pedantic and permissive at the same time. And we always think of the people of the past — just as we do of children — as being naïve in everything from their clothes and hairstyles to their thoughts and feelings.

Oksana Zabuzhko

I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.

Michael Ondaatje

Every city is a ghost.New buildings rise upon the bones of the old so that each shiny steel bean, each tower of brick carries within it the memories of what has gone before, an architectural haunting. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of these former incarnations in the awkward angle of a street or filigreed gate, an old oak door peeking out from a new facade, the plaque commemorating the spot that was once a battleground, which became a saloon and is now a park.

Libba Bray

I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.

Lois McMaster Bujold

I understand, Bill. Because I tell myself a lot of stories to help me sleep at night. Stories about how Babe was my dearest friend, and I never betrayed her. Stories about how you and I had a great love, not just an occasional roll in the hay whenever she was out of town. Stories about how wonderful life was back then, when none of us told each other the truth, but so what? It was all so beautiful, wasn’t it? It was all so lovely and gracious. Not like it is now.

Melanie Benjamin

My dear, you never will understand time, will you? You're always trying to be the things you were, instead of the person you are tonight. Why do you save those ticket stubs and theater programs? They'll only hurt you later. Throw them away, my dear.

Ray Bradbury

We long to have again the vanished past, in spite of all its pain.

Sophocles

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

Adele Parks

Our identities are tremendously warped and distorted by yesterday's trauma and tomorrow's expectations.

Bryant McGill

It is we who move through time, not the reverse. When we walk beyond any one of life’s instants, it becomes nothing more than a receding milestone. We can look back, but we cannot retrace our steps. The past remains stationary, while we are doomed to move ever onwards. To do otherwise is against nature.

Andrew Levkoff

Weakness, like not being able to bury the past. Weakness, like not giving up hope when you know you should.

Julianna Baggott

Guilt is an indulgence, it entangles you in the past.

Gregg Hurwitz

To strengthen the connection between your conscious mind and your subconscious mind is to gain access to a map and compass to help you move towards your dream. To gain access to the subconscious mind is to gain the ability to see and create the future, the ability to shift the present, and the ability to alter your own perceptions of the past.

Kevin Michel

...how time packs new years over the old ones but how those old years are still in there, like the earliest, tightest rings centering a tree, the most hidden, enclosed in darkness and shielded from weather. But then a saw screams in and the tree topples and the circles are stricken by the sun and the sap glistens and the stump is laid open for the world to see.

Tom Franklin

You NEED to look back to remember the awesome memories, to remember the positive lessons you have learned, to help someone else learn from what you have lived and to see how far you have come.

Tanya Masse

As his boots walked towards the old station, he felt as though he were hallucinating. Scary apprehension increased the beat of his heart and the sweat upon his forehead was cold. The reality of where he stood created a sinking feeling inside of him. An old man everyone called Uncle Tucker once owned this place. His sole existence behind the counter all of the time, day and night. He could have been a creature out of a fairy tale, with his long white beard and equally long white hair. Merlin. The overalls and the ball cap perched upon his head, along with the half-smoked cigar with an endless burning orb positioned in his mouth. It made him a fixture in time. He wondered if Tucker would still be alive. Tucker with his endless stories of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, and flower children. A man that never left a country thousands of miles away where bicycles filled the capital. A man who never left those fields where killing occurred.

Jaime Allison Parker

Just because The Past always hung there upon its hooks on the game-room wall, you didn't have to pull it down and use it on yourself.

Dennis McFarland

Nothing helps a man to reform like thinking of the past with regret.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

WE COMMENTED TO Corrie about the practicalness of the things she recalled, how her memories seemed to throw a spotlight on problems and decisions we faced here and now. "But," she said, "this is what the past is for! Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for a future that only He can see.

Elizabeth Sherrill

They, who continue to stay turned to watch their past mistakes, will miss the potential successes of the future.

Christopher Riner

A long time ago someone told me that a story will tell itself, when it's ready.

Jodi Picoult

Don't sacrifice the present and attempt to achieve the impossible- to completely correct the past... It's gone! Learn from it and move on...

Assegid Habtewold

There exist no new mistakes anywhere. The same mistakes people committed are the same mistakes people are committing and the same mistakes shall people commit

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The one plentiful herds of magazine writers would continue to be culled - by the Internet, by the recession, by the American public, who would rather watch TV or play video games or electronically inform friends that, like, 'rain sucks!' But there's no app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day in a cool, dark bar. The world will always want a drink.

Gillian Flynn

Don’t be ruled by your past. Don’t be crippled by the past. Let the past be the past and focus on what is ahead. Remember however that if you neglect the most essential lessons of the past, you shall walk into the future with one leg.

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

When you’re in love with two people, always choose the second. The fact that you are constantly thinking of the second person makes it obvious that the first will never fulfill you, unless the second person did not fulfill you either. At this point, you have to choose the third person because God is getting a little tired of your inattention and indecisiveness, and is planning on sending a fourth person into your life just to slap you around with the bible for not entering the promised land.

Shannon L. Alder

If you want to know if someone was meant to be in your future, then remove all the worldly things about them from your mind. Don’t think about their looks, the intimate moments or their personality. Now, think about how they made you feel, how they improved your life and what virtues they possess that push you to want to become better. Did they bring you closer to God? Did they bring you to your life mission? Did they ever lie to you, betray you or made it impossible for you to feel comfortable speaking your mind? When you remove all the shine from a diamond, it becomes a glass rock. What value is it then? See beneath the surface and you will know who your future is with.

Shannon L. Alder

The past ignorance has great lessons for us in our present day. Until we take real lessons from the past ignorance which led us into our present situation, we shall always see shadows of the past in the present.

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Sometimes it's more painful to draw to mind the good times

Amy Molloy

...before you, life was desolate - the past hardly worth remembering - and now, each moment a keepsake I can't throw away ...

John Geddes

She didn't want to forget how deeply she had loved him, how important it had been to her; she felt as if to discard the memory would be a betrayal of her younger self.

Harriet Evans

Have you ever listened to a song from a long time ago; from your past; a song that was filled with so many memories tied to it, that you felt it so deeply- that it made you cry? And did you listen to it again, intentionally, for a second time? So you could travel back in time through that song; back when everything seemed so much simpler, basic, carefree? Those are the songs that are the soundtracks of our lives… the ones that bring back childhood memories, deep feelings, snapshots of our lives (or short videos), best friends, first loves, first heartbreaks… births, deaths. Our lives are like the record albums that we used to play just a few years ago; just yesterday. We played some of the songs over and over again- to the point of which we can sing along with every word as we play it. Other songs seem somewhat unfamiliar, as we rarely go back to listen to them; we skip over them or we barely listen to the start of it before we turn off the record player. But just like on a record album and just like in our memories, you can't cut a song out off an album... just like you can't cut out a memory. The songs and memories remain there, side by side; the good ones, the bad ones, the ones that thrill us and the ones that hurt. Those are the songs that our lives are composed of. Those are the songs that we chase back, back into our our own memories in our private and personal musical time machines.

José N Harris

When I look back on my childhood, my earliest memories seem like artifacts from a long-lost civilization: half-understood fragments behind museum glass.

Matthew Flaming

Whether beautiful or terrible, the past is always a ruin.

Matthew Flaming

October air, complete with dancing leaves and sighing winds greeted him as he stepped from the bus onto the dusty highway. Coolness embraced. The scent of burning wood hung crisp in the air from somewhere far in the distance. His backpack dropped in a flutter of dust. He surveyed dying cornfields from the gas station bus stop. Seeing this place, for the first time in over twenty years, brought back a flood of memories, long buried and forgotten.

Jaime Allison Parker

The log on the fire: is it dreaming of the forest?

Marty Rubin

I had forgotten, I suppose, that there were bright memories in amongst the dark.

Kate Morton

I was haunting you, for so long, that I forgot that I became a ghost too.

Melissa Jennings

It is said that nothing in our lives is ever lost, that nothing can prevent its having been. That is why, so very often the weight of the past lies ineluctably upon the present. But that is why it is so real in memory, so wholly itself, so far beyond replacement.

Marcel Proust

It takes just one day to remember one day! Mind today, for one day, you shall remember one day

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Things didn't really go away. You just learned to push them deeper.

Elizabeth Brundage

What he had remembered was to tuck among his changes of clothes one of Regan's framed photographs of the four of them from a few summers back, at Lake Winnipesaukee. He set it up on the nightstand, as if he might swim down into the past, where nothing could go wrong.

Garth Risk Hallberg

Was she Minh Thuy, finally, or was she Jenny? But the time when there had been a meaningful difference between the two would come to seem like a tiny neighborhood where you couldn't decide which house was yours. Which felt important when you were high above, you thought, in the foothills, but not so much at the truer remove of a continent, where the lives you'd lived and the places you'd come from, dwindled to a single point on the horizon, in the incorrigibly distant past.

Garth Risk Hallberg

He who knows the past well can best explain the present and can tell the probable certainties and uncertainties of the future better

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

It does not matter how much we distance ourselves, how far we run - the past always shadows us.

Jayne Castel

We cannot change the past, she thought. How we long to sometimes, trying to work out how horror might have been averted by a fluke of fortune, a kind intercession, wisdom not yet granted.

Anne M. Chappel

To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.

Frederick Buechner

Because of the past, so many people are living in the past! No one is free from the past, but we are free to choose to move from the past into the present or stay in the past, though we live in the present!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

History isn't all fact--it's just the story the victors tell to keep themselves in power. And it's been a slow revision. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to reinvent the past.

Heather Anastasiu

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The Past Quotes

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