Past Quotes

At least if you were ignorant, you could do what you wanted, you had no idea what had been achieved in the past. You were free, instead of chewed at by bleeding impotence, dissolved away like a pearl in acid.

~ Hamza Wolf

Sometimes, at the least opportune times, the past is an insomniac, alive and well.

~ Courtney Cole

Our past may shape us, but it doesn't define us.

~ Alyson Noel

The past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it’s got no reality, it’s just a set of facts that you’ve learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn’t merely come back to you, you’re actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.

~ George Orwell

My past has shaped me, that's true of anyone.

~ R.k. Lilley

I couldn’t help but feel as if everyone had lied about everything. We all had secrets. We all had a dark side to our innocent cover. I wondered what we would be like, if we had been completely honest with each other in the first place. Maybe more people would be alive, but then again, more people could be dead.

~ Shannon A. Thompson

There comes a moment in life when one must acknowledge that you just can't keep looking back into your past for reasons to keep someone in your present and future. Regardless of how much looking that cruel reality in the eye hurts...memories can't be enough.

~ Eiry Nieves

Only fools prefer the past!

~ Frank Herbert

For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.

~ Anna Funder

It has been said, people drawn to law enforcement have a sixth sense, an ability to see what others do not. He prayed he was wrong. His sixth sense said there was much more than a broken heart in Claire's past.

~ Aleatha Romig

You can never forget the past unless you face up to it.

~ Fan Wu

The past is not a place I like to visit. This project is forcing me to go there, to tidy up my thoughts. I'm not normally a navel-gazer. I've always thought you find yourself in other people. I'm visiting here. I don't want to set up house.

~ Bono

Tension is the Mirror of our Past.

~ Saab

To celebrate the Fourth of July meant something definite in those days.

~ Carol Ryrie Brink

The past will be your teacher if you learn from it, your master if you live in it.

~ Steve Maraboli

Who knows what's for true once a time is past? There's no way to prove how something was that's gone. And if a time is gone, what does it matter? It's all rain into rivers now.

~ Jo Dereske

Spiritual growth involves giving up the stories of your past so the universe can write a new one.

~ Marianne Williamson

...the wounds of the past and the scars of the present don't disfigure me in your eyes - because you know the price I pay for loving you ...

~ John Geddes

The danger of restorative nostalgia lies in its belief that the mutilated 'wholeness' of the body politic can be repaired. But the reflective nostalgic understands deep down that loss is irrecoverable: Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world. In pop terms, Morrissey is the supreme poet of reflective nostalgia.

~ Simon Reynolds

The Past is Experience, Thats All You Got to Learn From.

~ Mary Norton

He noticed that she threw away the crumbled bus ticket on the street as soon as she got down. He picked it up and put it in his pocket along with his own a memorabilia of their first date together, just like a strand of her hair he would find later on his shirt and the broken pen cap that she would go on to search in the laboratory and so many other such small things which he would collect.

~ Faraaz Kazi

I didn't hear you come in. I was away with the ghosts of my beautiful youth.

~ Eva Rice

He took the last seat, as usual, a subtle reminder of what he was and what he had become.

~ Faraaz Kazi

Stay More' is synonymous with 'Status Quo' in fact, there are people who believe, or who like to believe, that the name of the town was intended as an entreaty, beseeching the past to remain present.

~ Donald Harington

...the answer is not in the damn blank page - it's in the days or years before and you have to dredge it up - exhume the past again ...

~ John Geddes

Our past is the forge upon which we are hardened and tempered, to prepare us for the present. We are like a fine blade that must be hammered into shape before it can be ready to make its finest cuts.

~ Larry Atchley Jr.

Everyone has a past, but that's just it--it's in the past. You can learn from it, but you can't change it.

~ Nicholas Sparks

How can anyone truthfully claim to love someone when they’re not prepared to share everything with that person, including their past?

~ Jan-Philipp Sendker

You can't just wipe away your history.

~ T.j. Klune

But thing in the past are like plate that’s shattered to pieces. You can never put it back together like it was, right?

~ Haruki Murakami

In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.

~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is becalmed, one of the telescopes will be in continual use; it will seem to tell the whole, the unchanging truth. But this is an illusion; and as the boat sets off again, we return to our normal activity: scurrying from one telescope to another, seeing the sharpness fade in one, waiting for the blur to clear in another. And when the blur does clear, we imagine that we have made it do so all by ourselves.

~ Julian Barnes

I am slowly learning to pluck the flowers of my past from the weeds, and place them in the window where I can see them first. ~Call Me Tuesday

~ Leigh Byrne

You don’t rewrite it, censor it, or edit it, to suit some warped view you have of the past and your own present.

~ V.t. Davy

He walks through the house of his past, hoping he'll find the right door, hoping he'll find the key.

~ Steven Herrick

We all have a past that may be worthy of some criticism.~R. Alan Woods [2012]

~ R. Alan Woods

I missed my mother and Elysius. It wasn't that I wanted them with me at that very moment. I wanted them in the past. I wanted to have back just one sunny afternoon together.

~ Bridget Asher

Anachronism is not the inconsequential juxtaposition of epochs, but rather their inter-penetration, like the telescoping legs of a tripod, a series of tapering structures. Since it's quite far from one end to the other they can be opened out like an accordion; but they can also be stacked inside one another like Russian dolls, where the walls around time periods are extremely close to one another. The people of other centuries hear our phonographs blaring, and through the walls of time we see them raising their hands towards the deliciously prepared meal.

~ Elisabeth Lenk

The past is important for all the information and wisdom it holds. But you can get lost in it. You've got to learn to keep the knowledge of the past with you as you pursue the present.

~ Lauren Kate

There have been times, lately, when I dearly wished that I could change the past. Well, I can’t, but I can change the present, so that when it becomes the past it will turn out to be a past worth having.

~ Terry Pratchett