Quotes About Past

Everything in our lives," she said quietly, "leads up to everything else in our lives. So a moment in the present has a reference point, both in the past and in the future. I want you to know that you--as you are right now and as you ever wil be--are fully enough for this moment . . .

Firelight and Polly had lent a momentary charm to the parlor but now, looking up at the portrait, he was aware of having passed under the shadow of a dark hand. Emma, he realized, lived under it always. Her parlor was her past, and Isaac's, and if Issac in tearing himself out of its grip had torn himself too he was better off with his asthma and his nerves and his eccentricity than Emma. Better to struggle through life with a broken wing than have no wings at all.

The past, she knew, is inviolable, one of the few things in life that cannot be marred by present foolishness, and in it the present may find its peace.

If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself. You can take it down like a can from a shelf. Perhaps.

You can't run from feelings, Charity. You have to face them. Otherwise your future will look just like your past.

I've always hated the notion, in life or in fiction, that the human personality is a puzzle to be solved, that we are a single flashback away from understanding why this person is cruel to her children, why that man has a dreamy, downcast look. A human being is not a lock and the past is not a key.

According to Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig, the Swiss analyst and author of Marriage: Dead or Alive , a wedding is more than a party or a legality. It's not less than a boxing ring, two people facing off, acknowledging their separate identities rather than their union, in the company of all the people who lay claim to them. A wedding is the time and place to recognize the full clutch of the past in the negotiation of a shared future.

My family." "No! You never mentioned that." She had noticed an endearing pattern: whenever Paul felt guilty or in need of affection, he'd tell a painful story about his past.

She became a story, one I have mostly forgotten. One I can't end because she died a long time ago.

The key to Hadrian's behaviour, and to the subsequent integration of a style of rule, may be found in his relationship with the past. He was a broadly read man and a passionate, if nostalgic, historian, and the innovations of his reign as well as the strategies he adopted to consolidate power were all consistent with his pervasive sense of the past. His own immediate experience, infused with a broad knowledge of Mediterranean history, shaped the future of his empire.

Nothing is long ago.

The time had come for no more czars. Russia was on the verge of violent revolution; only a complete break from the past, Kerensky insisted, would persuade the masses that a new, more just future was dawning, and that the forces of despotism were now yielding to the forces of freedom.

If music can ever restore a lost past, then this was the moment. Redemption! We do crave it. But music is different: we tolerate songs without redemption.

I long for Europe of the ancient parapets.

Cela s'est passé. Je sais aujourd'hui saluer la beauté.

I wish to discover all secrets, the mysteries of religion, nature, death and birth, the future and the past, the formation of the universe, nonexistence. I am a teacher in creating the extraordinary. Listen!

Por primera y —lamentablemente— última vez, la memoria histórica se utilizó no para enfrentar, sino para unir sin olvidar.

Los tiempos en que conseguías controlarme pertenecen ya al pasado. Ahora que comprendo que eres la causa de todos mis problemas, te eliminaré en cuanto aparezcas.

Nothing we do can change the past, but everything we do changes the future.

Things could crawl at you out of the dark and hurt you again and again. The past did not always stay dead.

For his first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased.

A thorough knowledge of the past could lead a profound scholar to predict the future course of history with great accuracy, provided that it did not turn out quite differently.

The dead govern the living.

The past is a tyrant and it won't allow my family to come back to me. But the present generously lifts my downcast face and makes me see that, although I can't change what I was, I can construct what I will be.