PAST QUOTES III
quotations about the past
I've had a lot of sleepless nights. Nights when I was so worried about something that had happened in the past that I let it dictate my future. We've all been there at some point. You're not alone. I'm talking about those times when we just can't shake the past. Whether it's something small, like making a terrible first impression, or saying something you wish you hadn't, to something big, like having to shutdown your business. Harping on negative experiences is painful and, when we hold on to that pain, we can't move on to something more positive. That's why it's important that you let it go and leave the past behind.
JOHN RAMPTON
"8 Steps to Move Away From the Past You Need to Leave Behind", Entrepreneur, March 11, 2016
Over the trackless past, somewhere,
Lie the lost days of our tropic youth,
Only regained by faith and prayer,
Only recalled by prayer and plaint,
Each lost day has its patron saint!
BRET HARTE
"The Lost Galleon"
The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me ... all that's left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears - I shall not find myself.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
Old Age
And that past is ever present,
Ever present in my heart,
Filling it with sweetest love-thoughts,
As I tread the world's wide mart.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
Thoughts
A good knowledge of things past is an armour against events to come.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The reverberation often exceeds through silence the sound that sets it off; the reaction occasionally outdoes by way of repose the event that stimulated it; and the past not uncommonly takes a while to happen, and some long time to figure out.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
Our yesterdays
Are like a lonely and a ruined land
Wherein a breeze of recollection sighs--
A fading land to which is no return.
HENRY ABBEY
"Invocation to the Sun"
The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.
KIRAN DESAI
The Inheritance of Loss
Who recollects distinctly his past adventures, knows his destiny to come.
JOHANN CASPAR LAVATER
Aphorisms on Man
Whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners to it.
BARACK OBAMA
speech, June 4, 2009
You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.
JODI PICOULT
The Storyteller
With each passing moment I'm becoming part of the past. There is no future for me, just the past steadily accumulating.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
The past is a mist.
HAROLD PINTER
Moonlight
The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.
ÉMILE ZOLA
The Masterpiece
You always romanticize the past as soon as the future begins to frighten you.
RICK REMENDER
Uncanny X-Force, No. 16, December 2011
We are products of our past, but we don't have to be prisoners of it.
RICK WARREN
The Purpose Driven Life
Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Blood Meridian
Life would be no better than candlelight tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
It is yesterday that makes tomorrow so sad.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.
CHARLES DICKENS
David Copperfield