Past Quotes

By handling each sentimental item and deciding what to discard, you process your past. If you just stow these things away in a drawer or cardboard box, before you realise it, your past will become a weight that holds you back and keeps you from living in the here and now. Pg.116-117

~ Marie Kondō

I wouldn't ask too much of her,' I ventured. 'You can't change the past.''Can't change the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

It is not memories but the person we have become because of those past experiences that we should treasure. This is the lesson these keepsakes teach us when we sort them. The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not the person we were in the past. P.118

~ Marie Kondō

How long since he'd been back home? Ten years? Fifteen? He'd stopped keeping track around the time he'd finally stopped looking over his shoulder. At the time, leaving had seemed too good to be true. He'd spent months feeling like he was half a step ahead of some nameless specter; like if he let his guard down, even for a second, whatever it was would drag him right back where he'd come from.

~ Laura Oliva

The future is completely open and so is the past. And we are writing them right now. Making a different past or future is only up to us now.

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

My sense of the past is vivid and slow. I hear every sign and see every shadow.

~ Barry Hannah

Not everything buried is actually dead. For many, the past is alive.

~ Louise Penny

You want to brawl. You want to fight. Fighting tricks you into believing you can change the past, even when the past is dead and gone and all of it ashes.

~ Ilsa J. Bick

He was a stranger here. The people who might remember him would certainly not welcome him. His old gang had cast him out, along with all of the former friends and parents. The suburban landscape of hypocrisy, so hated in his youth, beheld again and with it, old feelings that motivated him through life more than he would ever admit. Every turning point in life, already decided by all the events here

~ Jaime Allison Parker

It's hard getting momentum riding a bike up hill... It's hard getting momentum when you're dragging around all the pain from your past.

~ Tony Curl

When people talk about their great past they're usually trying to excuse the mediocre present.

~ Terry Pratchett

You can't forget the past.

~ Jen Calonita

You forget the life you had before, after awhile. Things you cherish and hold dear are like pearls on a string. Cut the knot and they scatter across the floor, rolling into dark corners never to be found again. So you move on, and eventually you forget what the pearls even looked like. At least, you try.

~ Diana Gabaldon

It is dreadful to think that behind me my own past is no longer anything but shifting darkness.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

Well, I think the first thing to do when trying to let go of the past is to accept it. Denial only delays the problem for later. Deal with it now.

~ Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

Let's not go into the past.

~ Ramakrishna

Dwelling on the sins of the past won't help us stop the evils of the present.

~ Andrew Mayne

If we should be blessed by some great reward, such as fame or fortune, it's the fruit of a seed planted by us in the past.

~ Bodhidharma

That's what I like so much about libraries, they smell the way we would like to imagine the past.

~ Ruth Reichl

Your dirty past somehow puts GOD's grace on blast, it amplifies the great grace of GOD over your life.

~ Temitope Ibrahim

The sky sinks slowly inside the past.

~ Barbara Guest

The past is not a package one can lay away.

~ Emily Dickinson

It can be very seductive to tell our story to others who will listen because, lets face it, who doesn't love to 'commiserate' (in this context, meaning to share their misery) with other likeminded people. It justifies our attachment to the drama. The interesting thing about telling our story over and over is that it becomes even more deeply ingrained in our minds each time we tell it, and the universe delights in keeping whatever we claim as our story alive.

~ Dennis Merritt Jones

Recent generations seem to consider ‘old-fashioned’ thinking as out-dated and without place in the modern world. I beg to differ. After all, who has greater faith? He who looks to and learns from the past, or the man who cares not for consequence?

~ Fennel Hudson

If you would understand the present, you must come to know the past.

~ Libba Bray

The challenge is to draw on the past but not be bound by it p. 20

~ David Brazzeal

Learn from the past, he said. Remember it and realize that in a way it is responsible for making you who you are. But also realize that the only you who really matters is who you are right now. That is the you who has the ability to act, to change lives, to do something monumental, and to influence the future you.

~ Kelli Swofford Nielsen

The past wasn’t a guest you could ask to leave when you tired of its company. No, the past put up its feet and meant to stay.

~ Sonja Yoerg

To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The better life she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one.

~ Toni Morrison

He went to hell and back, to shut the door of his past, he would not let that door be opened again by others.

~ Kusumastuti

Past is aipsom if you learned from the past.

~ Debasish Mridha

Only the present exists. The past is gone, and the future has not yet happened. There is only ever time present.

~ Fennel Hudson

Everyone had a story behind them, a past richer than she had imagined.

~ Tyrean Martinson

She'd known me my whole life. It's hard to throw away history. It was like you were throwing a part of yourself.

~ Jenny Han

Just because you have a past with someone, doesn't mean you should have a future with them.

~ Robert Tew

The past will disappear if we forget we existed.

~ Damond Jiniya

Oh yes, the past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it or learn from it.

~ Rafiki

Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right.

~ George Orwell

Don't torture yourself over the past. Use it as a teacher. Whatever happened to you in the past, has only prepared you for now.

~ Robert Tew

It does not matter what I believe. The past is done. Hope is irrelevant. We measure success and failure in history with a cost of lives. Penicillin saved people, and the world wars exterminated them. Success and failure. Feelings, regrets, the point where they knew they made mistakes...it is interesting but unfortunately, irrelevant. Did they go to their death and grieve for what they did? Did the makers of the atomic bomb grieve for the destruction they dedicated their lives towards creating? Who cares? They did it. Whether they knew what they were creating, or whether they talked themselves into believing it was for the best, the glory of history is being able to view it in black-and-white. However honorable one's initial intention, a villain will always be a villain.

~ Caroline Hanson