Past Quotes

Past is past... no it's not! People are always fond of saying that, but what's past is never past; not entirely.

~ Anne Tyler

That K was hesitant in love does not mean that his love was in any sense lukewarm. He was unable to move, despite the violence of his emotion. And since the impact of his new emotion was not so great as to allow him to forget himself, he was forced to look back and remind himself of what his past had meant. And in doing so he could not but continue along the path that he had so far followed.

~ Sōseki Natsume

You cannot be who you were.

~ D.j. Molles

Ghosts will forever put in appearances, as they should. Our illusions have muscle and meaning. The past returns at midnight, in the heart of our dreams, and the rains and the willows forever remind us of the sacrifices we’ve offered and those we have yet to make.

~ Tom Piccirilli

Only Jesus can take care of the past. But we can help Him with the present.

~ Calvin W. Allison

There were so many wrongs piling up on both sides, so much of the past being dragged into the present, that living there was like carving the story of your life on to a sepulchral monument.

~ Sara Sheridan

What to do with the past? There was so much of it.

~ Robert Hellenga

Sarah’. She had thought they had thrown that bit of history into the trash, and the trash into the incinerator. But apparently ‘Sarah’ had only been thrown into a plastic bag and left in the closet under the bathroom sink, where the packet gathered mold and fungus and slowly acquired a signature stink. That stench was now slowly escaping from between the gap of the doors and the bathroom floor. Sarah was Siddharth’s ex.

~ Shweta Ganesh Kumar

The are things that you might forget, but you might not clearly forget. Time is the only coin you have to buy the things you want to remember, and to pay for the things you want to leave behind.

~ Aileene Mhar Jabarani

Your past is just a story. And once you realise this, it has no power over you.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct, Several European countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the criminal and the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.

~ Nikola Tesla

The day we forget the horror, Sam, we will repeat it. Never forget your past. It will make you less human, less than human.

~ Katherine Reay

Every time the song looped, all I heard was the part about the lies - and how they weigh you down. Tonight, as I drive toward Detroit in my Jeep, I know what those words really mean. It's not just the lies they're referring to. It's life. You can't run to another town, another place, another state. Whatever it is you're running from - it goes with you. It stays with you until you find out how to confront it.

~ Colleen Hoover

I think houses live their own lives along a time-stream that's different from the ones upon which their owners float, one that's slower. In a house, especially an old one, the past is closer.

~ Stephen King

Remembering something from the past? you are creating it right now as evidence for who you are now.

~ Frederick Dodson

knowing deep inside some ghosts are too cruel to question

~ Laura Wiess

Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.

~ Sara Sheridan

The simultaneity of near and far confused me; I thought it possible to find the past, the present and the future united in one place, giving it all that life can hold; but I had grave doubts that at any given moment life might reign both here and there, on this side and that side of the seas and mountains. And such doubts, demanding resolution, may have inspired earliest journeys: I went forth, not to learn what fear was but to test what the names held and feel their magic in the flesh, just as, at the open window, you feel the miraculous power of the sun you'd long seen reflected on distant hills and spread on dewy meadows.

~ Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Palaeontology is the Aladdin's lamp of the most deserted and lifeless regions of the earth, it touches the rocks and there spring forth in orderly succession the monarchs of the past and the ancient river streams and savannahs wherein they flourished. The rocks usually hide their story in the most difficult and inaccessible places.

~ Roy Chapman Andrews

My fascination with history is as much about the present as it is about the past.

~ Sara Sheridan

The question shouldn't be, 'Are we guilty about our Colonial past?' it should be, 'Why aren't we more guilty about our corporate present?

~ Sara Sheridan

You can't change the things you've done. It's now and the here on out you've got control of.

~ Mindy Mcginnis

The trouble with drowning in the mess of your own life is that you're not in any shape to save anyone else. You can't be a lighthouse when you're underwater yourself.

~ Lisa Wingate

...The most important thing, I think. You can't run from your past. You have to take it for what it is and realize that it's part of you.

~ Lisa Wingate

My life's a tangle of past and present, like two separate puzzles with their pieces tumbled together. Nothing fits.

~ Emily Murdoch

Night is when the whispers of the past become the echoes of the present.

~ Faraaz Kazi

Everyone’s past has ways of sneaking up on them. You just have to be in a place in the present that you’re strong enough to deal with when your past comes to visit.

~ K.k. Hendin

we use to regret over our past... but sometimes i wonder why ???because everything we did in past was best from our side, well in case of both doing and thinking...

~ Lovely Goyal

Never erase your past. It shapes who you are today and will help you to be the person you'll be tomorrow.

~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

But think no more of the letter. The feelings of the person who wrote, and the person who received it, are now so widely different from what they were then, that every unpleasant circumstance attending it ought to be forgotten. You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.

~ Jane Austen

Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly?

~ Diane Setterfield

Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much.

~ Jack Kerouac

No one can escape their past. The sins we've committed... and the sadness we've caused... No matter how far we run, our past remains, as ever-present as the moon in the sky. It looms in wait... for the day when we are forced to face it. But only in doing so can we truly make peace and move on in hope towards tomorrow.

~ Phoenix Wright

It is through your experience you find out who you really are and who you are is from finding your own experience who really defines you.

~ Charleston Parker

The past is devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards.

~ E.m. Forster

Do you know that I love now to recall and visit at certain dates the places where Iwas once happy in my own way? I love to build up my present in harmony with the irrevocable past...

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I guess sometimes there are moments when people’s lives change and they don’t even know it. They can look back later, when everything's different, and say yes, that was the start of it―that’s when it all began, and I didn't even notice.

~ Robert Swindells

Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened.

~ Siri Hustvedt

I am mindful that scientific achievement is rooted in the past, is cultivated to full stature by many contemporaries and flourishes only in favorable environment. No individual is alone responsible for a single stepping stone along the path of progress, and where the path is smooth progress is most rapid. In my own work this has been particularly true.

~ Ernest O. Lawrence

How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at the end-of-the-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet.

~ Julian Barnes