Past Quotes

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

Her soft trailing fingers would continue to attempt a connection that I refused to allow, that I couldn’t allow if I wanted to survive.

~ J.d. Stroube

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

Sometimes, Miss Jarmond, it's not easy to bring back the past. There are unpleasant surprises. The truth is harder than ignorance

~ Tatiana De Rosnay

Sitting on the floor, I'd replay the past in my head. Funny, that's all I did, day after day after day for half a year, and I never tired of it. What I'd been through seemed so vast, with so many facets. Vast, but real, very real, which was why the experience persisted in towering before me, like a monument lit up at night. And the thing was, it was a monument to me.

~ Haruki Murakami

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

~ Salman Rushdie

Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.

~ W.h. Auden

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

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

There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

~ Joan Didion

When I moved, I unearthed the diaries I kept for ten years. I sat and went through them and they were a worthless burden to own. People will say it's tragic I threw them out, but I know it isn't.

~ Bill Callahan

And it is clear to Evan, now: the difference between what is and what has been done; the present and the past. He sees that what he does and who he is isn't based on the past unless he wants it to be... No. That is the past, which has been seen differently through many different eyes and has become hazy and unclear, like a pond when stirred with a stick. Only the present moment is clear and free from prejudice.

~ Garth Stein

(M)uch as we might imagine we can leave the past behind, it has a nasty way of pressing its hoary old face against the window just as we were sitting down to the feast.

~ Valerie Martin

What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you're so wrecked it's hard to believe you ever were a child?

~ Mitch Albom

Not watching the path where his legs took him, he walked on because he knew he had to walk ahead, leaving his past behind.

~ Faraaz Kazi

I don't know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination.

~ Jodi Picoult

It is unthinkable in the twentieth century to fail to distinguish between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be prosecuted and what constitutes that past which ought not to be stirred up.

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

To live meant feeding my former self to my current self.

~ Cameron Conaway

If you have ever felt hopeless hang on The night you’re enduring may seem long but there is joy coming in the morning. Incredible changes are going to take place in your life as you begin to relinquish your past and renew your present.

~ Sue Augustine

by now you've already formed your own impression. you believe that an act committed a lifetime ago defines a man, or you believe that a person's past has nothing to do with his future. you think i am either a hero, or a monster. maybe knowning more about circumstances will make you think differently about me, but it won't change what happened twenty-eight years ago.

~ Jodi Picoult

In half hour my mother has managed to give me what my father couldn't: my past.

~ Jodi Picoult