The Past Quotes

The present is an eternal attempt to separate the past from the future.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The past is set down in a thousand thousand indelible scrolls. But the future is a blank parchment forever in wait of a present.

~ Andrew Levkoff

Anything you don’t want to deal with can always be written off as being “in the past” and ignored, but in doing so, you sweep it under a rug where it doesn't go away with time – it becomes time itself, and takes on the illusion of life as we think we know it.

~ A.j. Darkholme

A vision of the little house in Soho flickered across his mind’s eye, his mother at a desk, writing in her journal, with hazy sunlight streaming through the morning windows. The woman inhabited a world he had once thought his own – a world of publishers and reliable suppliers. A London that was confident and competent amid its grey, puddle-strewn streets.

~ Sara Sheridan

- I believe in unlimited discovery and achievement.- I believe that dreams can become reality.- I believe in true love.- I believe in kindness and intelligence.- I trust life, regardless.

~ Elysse Poetis

I’d wish it were easier to not allow other people’s pasts to create my own present.

~ Jonathan Harnisch

If there were past misdeeds, I do not believe we should nag or repeat them, never mind throw them in someone’s face. If they sincerely apologized and we genuinely forgave them, we must move on. Learn from mistakes, but move on. If we bring them up and toss them at the offender, we may not have actually forgiven them, even if we claim we have.

~ Cathy Burnham Martin

Almost all sadness comes from thinking about the past, and all worry from thinking about the future — present-mindedness is your only safe haven.

~ Bryant Mcgill

And then I got to thinking about how, if someone met me for the first time now, they would need to know about Uncle Ed and my parents in order to understand me. Sometimes it feels as though I’m defined by all the people I’ve lost , like one of those negative-space pictures, where what’s not there is just as important as what is.

~ Claire Wong

in these shitty plastic days ...

~ Gillian Flynn

I thought about how the past can become so small. An entire day, 24 separate, heavy hours, becomes the size of a tiny brown leaf falling from a tree. Before you know it, a whole year is just a pile of dead leaves on the ground. The year or so I’d spent in love with Chad was starting to feel so long ago, swept away by the wind. I knew that this year would soon feel far away too.

~ Kimberly Novosel

Some of our friends are our friends only because we used to be friends.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A great mystery lies in the repetition and continuity of the renewal of that which is past. Culture perpetuates itself in memory and the big job is the reawakening of memory.

~ Hans-George Gadamer

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

~ Margaret Atwood

I told her I was not sure I could bear living with memories, she said, Look up at the stars, look, they are not there, what you see is the memory of what once was, once upon a time.

~ Rabih Alameddine

The past and present are after all so close, almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.

~ Iris Murdoch

Happiness is like good health: when you have it, you don’t notice it. But as the years go by, oh, the memories, the memories of happiness past!

~ Mikhail Bulgakov

When one embraces a moment of rapture from the past, either by trying to reclaim it or by refusing to let it go, how can its brightness not tarnish, turn grey with longing and sorrow, until the wild spell of the remembered interlude is lost altogether and the memory of sadness claims its rightful place in the mind? And what is it we expect from the sun-drenched past? There is no formula for re-entry, nothing we can do to enable reconstruction.

~ Jane Urquhart

She used to wander through the past as often as it beckoned her, bemoaning the loss of nostalgia. Then, for a while, she turned from it, blissfully free of its noxious clutch, and now it's back, taunting her with what she left behind, knowing she can never recapture what's gone.

~ Donna Lynn Hope

But it is always easy to put together stories about a past which nobody any longer remembers, like those about journeys to countries where nobody has ever been.

~ Marcel Proust

The Englishman left months ago, Hana, he's with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit.

~ Michael Ondaatje

I now know how your angercame from skeletonsthat rattled in your heartand you couldn't escape them.

~ Susie Clevenger

MOTHER TIME: Life goes by so very fast, my dears, and taking the time to reflect, even once a year, slows things down. We zoom past so many seconds, minutes, hours, killing them with the frantic way we live that it's important we take at least this one collective sigh and stop, take stock, and acknowledge our place in time before diving back into the melee. Midnight on New Year's Eve is a unique kind of magic where, just for a moment, the past and the future exist at once in the present. Whether we're aware of it or not, as we countdown together to it, we're sharing the burden of our history and committing to the promise of tomorrow.

~ Hillary Depiano

The past is buried deep within the ground in Rabat, although the ancient walls in the old city are still standing, painted in electrifying variations of royal blue that make the winding roads look like streamlets or shallow ocean water.

~ Raquel Cepeda

It is not good for the spirits to dwell on that which cannot be altered.

~ Amanda Quick

I am not where I need to be, but, thank God, I am not where I used to be.

~ Joyce Meyer

when you shoot for the stars, you can't ever look back.

~ Brittany Perloff

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

~ William Maxwell

MOTHER TIME: The past is always with us, dear, for better or worse. It is what it is and you can't change it. All you can do is learn how to live with it in the present.

~ Hillary Depiano

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

~ Frederick Dodson

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence

~ T.s. Eliot

It’s not a crime to wish for other worlds. You’ll get taxed for it but they can’t throw you in jail for creating your own private world…yet. Dramatics are fun, an indulgence. ‘You can’t go backward,’ ‘You can’t live in the past,’ they tell you. Why not? ‘You’ve got to put all that behind you and move on to other things,’ they say. Bullshit! These are all expressions of modern disposability. It’s a mediocritizing technique—trying to get rid of what I call ‘past orthodoxies.’ It’s our past that makes us unique, therefore it’s our past that economic interests want to rob from us, so they can sell us a new, improved future. Society now depends on a disposable world—out with the old, in with the new, including relationships. But how we weep and wish we could hold onto those cherished moments forever, to those long-whispered dreams, those tortured nights—how we want to grasp them and stop them from sifting through our fingers. I say, ‘Don’t let it happen. Keep things the way you want them and let the rest of the world be duped.

~ Anton Szandor Lavey

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

History isn't all fact--it's just the story the victors tell to keep themselves in power. And it's been a slow revision. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to reinvent the past.

~ Heather Anastasiu

Because of the past, so many people are living in the past! No one is free from the past, but we are free to choose to move from the past into the present or stay in the past, though we live in the present!

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

When the past comes knocking, don't answer. It has nothing new to tell you.

~ Auliq Ice

It turns out that sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you're alone. It feels less like a wound and more like a poultice.

~ Jodi Picoult

To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.

~ Frederick Buechner

We cannot change the past, she thought. How we long to sometimes, trying to work out how horror might have been averted by a fluke of fortune, a kind intercession, wisdom not yet granted.

~ Anne M. Chappel

It does not matter how much we distance ourselves, how far we run - the past always shadows us.

~ Jayne Castel