Quotes About Past

Lois had gone out of my life (I should say that she had left my future—I could never eradicate her from my past, no matter how hard I tried)

The castle? The monster? The man of learning? I only just thought of it. Surely you know that just as the momentous events of the past cast their shadows down the ages, so now, when the sun is drawing toward the dark,our own shadows race into the past to trouble mankind's dreams.

The past stood at my shoulder, naked and defenseless as all dead things, as though it were time itself that had been laid open by the fall of the mountain.

All time exists. That is the truth beyond the legends the epopts tell. If the future did not exist now, how could we journey toward it? If the past does not exist still, how could we leave it behind us?

All time exists. That is the truth beyond the legends the epopts tell. If the future did not exist now, how could we journey toward it? If the past does not exist still, how could we leave it behind us? In sleep the mind is encircled by its time, which is why we so often hear the voices of the dead there, and receive intelligence of things to come.

we have each of us in the dustiest cellars of our minds a counter at which we strive to repay the debts of the past with the debased currency of the present.

so we have each of us in the dustiest cellars of our minds a counter at which we strive to repay the debts of the past with the debased currency of the present.

I'd spent years saving for a future that was never coming to protect myself from a past that had already happened.

Most of us are so enthralled with the scary tigers in our minds--our stories of loneliness, rejection, grief--that we don't realize they are in the past. They can't hurt us anymore.

What we call the present is usually nothing more than a combination of a fragment of the past with a fragment of the future.

The pallid shades of memory struggle in vain with the life and freedom of the Present.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

Ten times a day I am compelled to reflect on my past life ... and I can never justify to myself the spending of four years on dramatic criticism. I have sworn an oath to endure no more of it. Never again will I cross the threshold of a theatre. The subject is exhausted; and so am I. I am off duty forever, and am going to sleep.

The Romans have set fire to the Library of Alexandria) THEODOTUS: —What is burning there is the memory of mankind. CAESAR: —A shameful memory. Let it burn. THEODOTUS (wildly): —Will you destroy the past? CAESAR: —Ay, and build the future with its ruins.

There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.

There's no harm in reviewing the past from time to time; knowing where you've been is part of knowing where you are, and all that happy horse shit. But the American media have an absolute fixation on this. They rob us of the present by insisting on the past. If they were able, I'm sure they would pay equal attention to the future. Trouble is, they don't have any film on it.

Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair.

If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, And what we have been makes us what we are

The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past.

Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile, in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.

other, just as if it had been only yesterday when

I shall never forget you. I have never forgotten anyone whom I once knew. My life has never been crowded, and seems not likely to be so.

No one in Middle march was likely to have such a notion of Lydgate's past as has here been faintly shadowed, and indeed the respectable townsfolk there were not more given than mortals generally to any eager attempt at exactness in the representation to themselves of what did not come under their own senses.