Past Quotes

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

~ Matthew Donnelly

To feel is to go to the places you were.

~ Will Advise

Human migration is an important part of our ancestral story. The places we live shape us, the places we leave behind forges our history, and the places we might travel to becomes our mysterious future.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

‎W. H. Auden once suggested that to understand your own country you need to have lived in at least two others. One can say something similar for periods of time: to understand your own century you need to have come to terms with at least two others. The key to learning something about the past might be a ruin or an archive but the means whereby we may understand it is--and always will be--ourselves.

~ Ian Mortimer

Memories tell me who I was, not who I’ll become. They don’t fix the present any more than they fix the past.

~ Caroline George

When the time is right, life will have a meaning.When the time is right, world will be bright again.When the time is right, things will fall into place.Just remember, never regret.

~ Akash Lakhotia

Some thoughts are like old piece of belongings that need to be disposed to move on.

~ Richmond Akhigbe

Most of us are so enthralled with the scary tigers in our minds--our stories of loneliness, rejection, grief--that we don't realize they are in the past. They can't hurt us anymore.

~ Geneen Roth

True, he had chosen to live alone, but not unbearably alone. The worst of being unbearably alone was that you had to bear it - either that or you were sunk. You had to work hard to prevent your mind from sabotaging you by its looking hungrily back at the superabundant past.

~ Philip Roth

When I look back at myself at age twenty, what I remember most is being alone and lonely. I had no girlfriend to warm my body or my soul, no friends I could open up to. No clue what I should do every day, no vision for the future. For the most part, I remained hidden away, deep within myself. Sometimes, I'd go a week without talking to anybody.

~ Haruki Murakami

It doesn't really matter who you used to be, what matters is who you've become.

~ Robert Tew

I understand true life doesn't happen when I constantly gaze backwards, mulling over all the injustices others have done or I have done to others.

~ Mary E. Demuth

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

[…] 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

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

~ Julie-Anne

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

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

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

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

~ Elizabeth George

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

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

~ Efrat Cybulkiewicz

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

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

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

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

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

~ Joyce Meyer