Quotes About Past

Rodriguez seldom concerned himself with the past, holding that the future is all we can order the scheme of. And maybe even here he was wrong.

it's the way we respond to such gifts that is up to us. We decide if our past hurts and pains are going to overshadow what is occurring right this moment.

Blasts from the past were like the rooms one entered and re-entered in dreams: they would not stay nailed down. When you returned to them, they had changed - they suddenly had more space or a tilt or a door that had not been there before. New people were milling around, the floors undulated, and the sun shone newly, strangely in the windows, or through the now blasted-open ceiling, or else it shone not at all, as if having fled the sky.

Amber was past tense. We were covering her inanimate face in the white sheet of was.

If you write a book set in the past about something that happened east of the Mississippi, it's a 'historical novel.' If you write about something that took place west of the Mississippi, it's a 'Western'- and somehow regarded as a lesser work. I write historical novels about the frontier.

Much of the study of history is a matter of comparison, of relating what was happening in one area to what was happening elsewhere, and what had happened in the past. To view a period in isolation is to miss whatever message it has to offer.

A smile of remembrance of lost times.

The world was filling with ghosts. We were a haunted country in a haunted world.

Water has its own archaeology, not a layering but a leveling, and thus is truer to our sense of the past, because what is memory but near and far events spread and smoothed beneath the present's surface.

The past is another country, but the journey could be made.

Zaten bir ÅŸey geçmiÅŸte kald??? zaman, onu ÅŸimdiki an?n gerçekliÄŸinde bir fanteziden, bir ilüzyondan farkl? k?lan ÅŸey nedir ki? Bir zamanlar yaÅŸanm?? olsa da art?k an?lar d???nda var olamaz.

Bilirsin biz kad?nlar?n ba?? an?larla döner; hayat?m?z boyunca yüzümüzü geçmiÅŸe dönüp geri geri yürürüz.

something, but she slept on, unmoving. There was more – plenty more – that he could have said, but he knew that the time for saying it was long past.

Gustav waited. He wondered whether he wanted to know the thing she was about to tell him, or whether it wasn't better for certain knowledge to remain hidden, so that the mind could conjure its own stories from out of the past, stories it could bear to live with, stories which, in time, took on their own reality and seemed to become true.

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.

Yet, in a settler society that has not come to terms with its past, whatever historical trauma was entailed in settling the land affects the assumptions and behavior of living generations at any given time, including immigrants and the children of recent immigrants.

I putter. I nurse old grudges. I fold origami while nursing old grudges. I think about the past. I wonder if there's any grudges I should start.

Que adiantava eu perguntar se ele se lembrava de uma coisa que ele queria se esquecer? Quem queria se lembrar era eu, que não queria construir nada de novo

What is has been. What will be is no more than a forgotten year striking backward.

Or ever the knightly years were gone      With the old world to the grave

I remember thinking you live from moment to moment and the moments all flow into one another forwards and backwards and you almost never catch one like this that's separate from the rest.

Which is like writing history backward, if you ask me, fixing the past to fit the present. Hindsight made over into foresight.

Time's arrow points one way only. Even the moment just past cannot be returned to.

We ought not to endeavor to revise history according to our latter day notions of what things ought to have been, or upon the theory that the past is simply a reflection of the present