Quotes About Past

anemoia nostalgia for a time you never experienced.

sitheless adj. feeling wistful upon brushing past a person you once shared a life with-noticing the same touch on the arm, seeing the same smile, hearing the same laugh you used to adore-suddenly all too aware that it's no longer for you, and lo longer carries the meaning it once did.

vellichor n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you'll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.

Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?

I expressed skepticism, in the first chapter, about the utility of time machines in historical research. I especially advised against graduate students relying on them, because of the limited perspective you tend to get from being plunked down in some particular part of the past, and the danger of not getting back in time for your orals.

A]lthough the past is never completely knowable, it is more knowable than the future.

Oblivioni sacrum [Sacred to oblivion].

There is a danger of expecting the results of the future to be predicted from the past.

what does 'functioning normally' mean?" I asked. "Being able to face the past. Having a normal sex life. Not lying awake all night in fits of anxiety." "Oh. Are most people able to face the past and have normal sex lives?" "Yes, as a matter of fact, I think they are," she said. "Anyway, if anyone is, it should be me. Deep down I have a talent for well-being. I can feel it." I nodded. I thought she had it, too, a talent for well-being.

But that was a long time ago, and life was as worth living now as it had been then. She would not willingly give up the present to have the past again.

Whenever the constraint is broken it changes conditions to the extent that it is very dangerous to extrapolate from the past." "As a matter of fact," Stacey adds, "even the things that we put in place in order to elevate the constraint must be reexamined.

But inheritance doesn't come from the past. Inheritance is the place we are given in the present in a world structured to care for the existence of some and not of others.

The wind is full of memories; It whispers low and clear The sacred echoes of the past, And brings the dead more near.

acknowledges that Napoleon stands fully justified in making that peace. I cannot expect so much justice in an Englishman. He would rather bury his past mistake in a present mistake than simply confess it.

I don't have any control over what memories I get, when I get them. Except every single one of them is something I would have rather forgotten. -- "Erase, Erase, Erase

My moment of infamy was a long time ago.

For all the air of comfort and grace she projected, however, Lesa noticed the white leather of her holster slung over her waist and buckled down to her thigh. Elena had a past as a duelist, too, and as a politician. And she wasn't about to let Claude Singapore forget it, even if Claude's position as prime minister was enough rank to let her enter another woman's household without surrendering her honor.

Everyone else had forgotten, or was forbidden from remembering, which came to the same thing. Dust had never been human, but he remembered.

Strifbjorn did understand, when he could sense the past uncomfortable tightness of jealousy in his throat.

I had a lover. She sent my lover. But he had had dealings with the Morningstar in the past, and I could not permit that one to claim him again.

Memories weigh something. They weigh you down.

old ladies who remembered when cotton briefs only cost ten cents a pair.

How can any child grope its way through life if its parents or guardians tear up all the pages of the past?

The antebellum embrace of Manifest Destiny committed many Americans to an ideal: a country without a past.