Past Quotes

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

~ Zadie Smith

I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.

~ Beryl Markham

Someone needs to tell those tales. When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There's magic in that. It's in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift. Your sister may be able to see the future, but you yourself can shape it, boy. Do not forget that... there are many kinds of magic, after all.

~ Erin Morgenstern

The past was always there, lived inside of you, and it helped to make you who you were. But it had to be placed in perspective. The past could not dominate the future.

~ Barbara Taylor Bradford

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.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else. I will never feel the pressure of peers or the burden of parental expectation. I can view everyone as pieces of a whole, and focus on the whole, not the pieces. I have learned to observe, far better than most people observe. I am not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present because that is where I am destined to live.

~ David Levithan

I don't fuck much with the past but I fuck plenty with the future.

~ Patti Smith

Forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself. It's saying, 'You're not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.' It's saying, 'You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.

~ Jodi Picoult

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

~ Haruki Murakami

The past was gone and the future had yet to unfold, and he knew he should focus his life on the present…yet his day-to-day existence suddenly struck him as endless and unbearable.

~ Nicholas Sparks

There is the past, and there is the future. The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other. We live poised on that second as it's hurtling forward—toward what?

~ Laini Taylor

No reflection was to be allowed now, not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet, so deadly sad, that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank, something like then world when the deluge was gone by.

~ Charlotte Brontë

How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.

~ George Eliot

People don't realize that the future is just now, but later.

~ Russell Brand

The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time--for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.

~ C.s. Lewis

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

~ Albert Einstein

Why don’t you focus on where you’re going and less on where you came from?

~ Amy Harmon

The time has come to lay that baggage down and leave behind all the struggling and striving. You can be set free as you journey forward into a balanced healthy and rewarding future.

~ Sue Augustine

The past is to be respected and acknowledged, but not worshipped; it is our future in which we will find our greatness.

~ Pierre Trudeau

You can't do anything about the past, it's done and can't be mended. But the future is different, if you just think what you really want and reach out and take it.

~ Lesley Pearse

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.

~ Alan Moore

To dream the future is much more better than to regret the past.But the best of all, to live in the present life with all of your power.

~ Toba Beta

Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

At times it may seem as though you and your past are one. Sometimes we fail to differentiate between what has happened to us and who we are today. If you have a hard time getting beyond that damaging mind-set let me encourage you right now. You are not your past Although you are changed and shaped by past experiences who you were yesterday does not control the person you have the potential to become tomorrow.

~ Sue Augustine

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.

~ Peter Mcwilliams

At some point the future becomes reality. And then it quickly becomes the past.

~ Haruki Murakami

What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.

~ Graham Swift

Young men speak about the future because they have no past, and old men speak of the past because they have no future.

~ Boyd K. Packer

I can’t take back the past, but I can fight for the future.

~ Shannon A. Thompson

And though some days it is very hard, I try not to live for the future. And I try not to dream of the past.

~ Chris Bohjalian

People from the past, have a tendency to walk back into the present, and run over the future.

~ Anthony Liccione

Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today.

~ André Breton

All that sunny afternoon, traveling north and east, Caroline believed absolutely in the future. And why not? For if the worst had already happened to them in the eyes of the world, then surely, surely, it was the worst that they left behind them now.

~ Kim Edwards

When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.

~ Mohsin Hamid

Of this I am certain, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.

~ Winston S. Churchill

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.

~ Peter Benchley

‎I cannot alter the past, but the future is very much in my hands.

~ Mary Lydon Simonsen

What you listen in heart, are echoes of the past.What you write today, will be echoed in the future.

~ Toba Beta

How can we prepare for the future if we won’t acknowledge the past?

~ N.k. Jemisin