Quotes About Past

Life is short, Hades is long. As Agathon says, you can't change the past, and as Aristotle says—paraphrasing—things are as they are, it's how we deal with them that counts.

If you've ever tried to keep a diary, then you'll know that the problem of trying to write about the past really starts in the present: No matter how fast you write, you're always stuck in the then and you can never catch up to what's happening now ; which means that now is pretty much doomed to extinction.

I thought progress was a good thing." "Well, maybe not if it just keeps piling up more junk and keeps you from fixing stuff from the past.

She chuckled to herself and wiped her eyes with her crooked old finger. Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren't tears. She wasn't crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.

memories are time beings

The tree was past and the paper is present, and yet paper still remembers holding itself upright and altogether. Like a dream, it remembers its sap.

why bother remembering a past that cannot be made into a present?

But repeating the guilt, living in the pain, in the past—it doesn't work. It denies time. It denies life.

We are not responsible for the mistakes committed by our previous generations. However, if we equate ourselves with them and regard ourselves as their heirs, we must then be ready to also share the responsibility for their mistakes.

There are those of us who learn to live completely in the moment. For such people the Past vanishes and the future loses meaning. There is only the Present, which means that two of the three Aalim are surplus to requirements. And then there are those of us who are trapped in yesterdays, in the memory of a lost love, or a childhood home, or a dreadful crime. And some people live only for a better tomorrow; for them the past ceases to exist

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.

Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes the stories less juicy...

She watched him recede into the past as he stood...each successive moment of him passing before her eyes and being lost forever.

The future, even when it was only a question-shrouded glimmer, would not be eclipsed by the past; even when death moved towards the centre of the stage, life went on fighting for equal rights.

Ravings, in short, jealousy of the past, the worst kind of all.

We walk unknowing amid the shadows of our past and, forgetting our history, are ignorant of ourselves.

his curse. "To be thin-skinned, far-sighted, and loose-tongued," he said, "is to feel too sharply, see too clearly, speak too freely. It is to be vulnerable to the world when the world believes itself invulnerable, to understand its mutability when it thinks itself immutable, to sense what's coming before others sense it, to know that the barbarian future is tearing down the gates of the present while others cling to the decadent, hollow past.

Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood.

REALITY IS A QUESTION of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems—but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.

Once, I belonged to the future. The beloved future of my beloved mother, that was what counted; the present was a means, and the past no more than a dull shard of pottery, a bottle dug up by my father on the beach. Now, however, I belong to yesterday. Is that a line from a song? I forget. Is it?

The past is a broken cardboard suitcase full of photographs of things I no longer wish to see.

And by that destiny, to perform an act Whereof what's past is prologue, what to come In yours and my discharge.

I should have known: no escape from past acquaintance. What you were is forever who you are.