Past Quotes

This happened back east of course. I've heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I never think of the term as a marker of geography. It's a reference to time, a statement about time, about all the densities of being and experience, it's time disguised, it's light-up time, shifting smoky time tricked out as some locus of stable arrangement. When people use that term they're talking about the way things used to be before they moved out here, the way the world used to be, not just New Jersey or South Philly, or before their parents moved, or grandparents, and about the way things still exist in some private relativity theory, some smoky shifting mind dimension, or before the other men and women came this way, the ones in Conestoga wagons, a term we learned in grade school, a back-east term, stemming from the place where the wagons were made. (pg.333)

~ Don Delillo

Why ruin the present by talking about the past?

~ Victor Robert Lee

The past is only the present become invisible and mute, its memoried glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious.

~ Mary Webb

The past is the past. It’s the present we should worry about.

~ Paul Russell

For as soon as we have used an opportunity and have actualized a potential meaning, we have done so once and for all. We have rescued it into the past/.../, wherein nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

It surprised me that I was already using the past tense. People I knew. As if I didn't know them anymore.

~ Ashley Newell

Past glories are poor feeding.

~ Isaac Asimov

The bottom line is this; when one person stops being a part of your life, another one will come, and fill that empty space. Leave the ones who left in the past, right where they belong, and never look back.

~ Ena Snow

There’s a ghost of a dream that you don’t even try to shake free off because you’re too in love with the way she haunts you.

~ Kamila Shamsie

When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation.

~ Marcel Proust

Have only this consolation--that he was never a fiend or even truly a madman, but only an eager, studious, and curious boy whose love of mystery and of the past was his undoing. He stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to know, and reached back through the years as no one ever should reach; and something came out of those years to engulf him.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

I don't think anyone's past is ever truly gone. You carry every experience, good and bad, within you.

~ Michele Vail

Such is the amazing power of stories to link us to our past and lead us all the way back to the present.

~ Margi Preus

The past is something that can not be fixed, but sets an example to fix the present to better the future.

~ John Yang Aka Private83

The past, rich with it's pains and joys, shuffles before me, relieving the weary dullness of endless days. I rejoice; I agonize.

~ Rukhsana Ahmad

The past is not complete until you are finished with it.

~ Donnie Harold Harris

The past marks on your slate only live on in your memory, if you allow them to remain. They can't affect your future if they're no longer there.

~ Melody Jackson

There is a lot I could have anticipated but I live in present & there is no anticipation to it, I wish I had a time machine

~ Pushpa Rana

You remain so silent,as carried away,through mist of your thoughts,so dark and so deep,and even awake same as when asleep,waiting for enlightenment of a newborn day.I'm bound to your silence,to the core i'm bound,to delicate stillness,so cruel and so tender,that despite of danger,soul yearns to surrender,to that mesmerizing absence of the sound.I resign everything i once knew so clear,throwing in the wind fragments of my past,they are worth so little,they're nothing but dust,nothing to remember,and nothing to fear...

~ Aleksandra Ninkovic

. . .though the names of lovers are forgotten in time, their nameswritten across the sky as ogham threads are tracedbetween the stars

~ John Daniel Thieme

Clear out all of those doubts and fears. Let the past be the past. It's time.

~ Bryant Mcgill

There's an old saying about those who cannot remember the past being condemned to repeat it. But those of us who refuse to forget the past are condemned to relive it.

~ Emily Thorne

The past is a tricky thing. Sometimes it's etched in stone. And other times, it's rendered in soft memories. But if you meddle too long in deep, dark things... Who knows what monsters you'll awaken?

~ Emily Thorne

Atonement was powerful, it was the lock on the door you closed against the past.

~ Stephen King

For the innocent, the past may hold a reward, but for the treacherous it's only a matter of time before the past delivers what they truly deserve.

~ Emily Thorne

There was something so heavy about the burden of history, of the past.

~ Sarah Dessen

Just because you're done with the past doesn't mean the past is done with you.

~ Paul Doiron

All things fade into the storied past, and in a little while are shrouded in oblivion.

~ Marcus Aurelius

Every thing has changed but my mind never.

~ Pavankumar Nagaraj

There is nothing for you to go back and live over, or fix, or feel regret about now. every part of your life has unfolded just right. And so -now- knowing all that you know from where you now stand, now what do you want? The answers are now coming forth to you. Go forth in joy, and get on with it.

~ Abraham Hicks

The fact that you made worse decisions in the past shouldn't be an excuse to make bad decisions in the present.

~ Sanhita Baruah

Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere.

~ J.m. Coetzee

There are all types of love in this world, but never the same love twice

~ Hafiz

One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness.

~ Iris Murdoch

You have to get clear in your present life — clear of the junk from your past.

~ Bryant Mcgill

There was a wonderful atmosphere of gentle age, a smell of flowers and beeswax, sweet yet faintly sour and musty; a smell that makes you feel very tender towards the past.

~ Dodie Smith

Reliving your painful past will poison your heart and your tomorrow.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Time laughs in the distance as I cling to the belief memories of you will fade.

~ Raine Cooper

The past is no good if you can't learn from it; therefore, no sense in dwelling on it.

~ Arians Karlovičs

When you learn to love your past it becomes the wings that allow you to fly rather than the burden you drag along behind you.

~ Victoria Reynolds