Quotes About Past

It must be asked here: why does the patient go on being worried by this that belongs to the past? The answer must be that the original experience of primitive agony cannot get into the past tense unless the ego can first gather it into its own present time experience….

It was all quite ghastly and I was very fond of it.

A better time. A simpler time,' said the Doctor. 'That's what we all yearn for. The pain of wanting to belong somewhere. To go home.

You know, the Elizabethans thought nostalgia was a diagnosable disease. Perhaps they were right.

Places remained and time flowed through them like wind through the grass. Right now. This was the future turning into the past. One thing becoming another. Like a flame on the end of a match. Wood turning into smoke. If only we could burn brighter. A barn roaring in the night.

Resurrection, he thought, comes not by plan or effort, and should the past ever come alive, it will be a great surprise, in which images and ritual memory will pale.

You'll be shot, they cautioned. No. I won't be shot. I'm going to shoot them, and then I'll go home. I'll be perfectly safe. I can see the future, and the clouds are lifting. You can see the future? How can you see the future? I know enough now about the patterns of the past to see the darkness of the future unraveling before the golden light of time. Behind the clouds is the dawn. How can I possibly know such things? The fact is, I do. So watch out.

They are all dead now.

Times like this become memories almost instantly, part of a gilded past that somehow coexists with the present. Remember whens to look back on even as they are happening, bittersweet and aglow with sunshine fading to sepia—the late September dust suspended in the wake of a passing car, leafy smell in the air, blue sky reflected in his sunglasses.

There is nothing cool about "used to be cool.

You'd lay there after you'd drunk the old moloko and then you got the messel that everything all around you was sort of in the past.

The old days are dead and gone days. For what I did in the past I have been punished. I have been cured.

I did not, however, as yet see him as one of those symbolic figures, of whom most people possess at least one example, if not more, round whom the past and the future have a way of assembling.

He spoke in that reminiscent, unctuous voice men use when they tell you that sort of thing more to savour an enjoyable past situation, than to impart information which might be of interest.

I wondered whether I wanted to hear more. The Jean business was long over, but even when you have ceased to love someone, that does not necessarily bring an indifference to a past shared together. Besides, though love may die, vanity lives on timelessly. I knew that I must be prepared to hear things I should not like. Yet, although where unfaithfulness reigns, ignorance may be preferable to knowledge, at the same time, once knowledge is brutally born, exactitude is preferable to uncertainty.

Even when you have ceased to love someone, that does not necessarily bring an indifference to a past shared together. Besides, though love may die, vanity lives on timelessly. I knew that I must be prepared to hear things I should not like. Yet, although where unfaithfulness reigns, ignorance may be preferable to knowledge, at the same time, once knowledge is brutally born, exactitude is preferable to uncertainty.

the sombre demands of the past becoming at times almost suffocating in their insistence.

It's not what's happening to you now or what's happened in your past that determines who you become. Rather, it's your decisions about what to focus on, what things mean to you, and what you're going to do about them that will determine your ultimate destiny.

Must we be strangers, you and I, because there was a time in which we were almost more than friends?

CHRISTMAS OF 1860 IS NOW THREE YEARS PAST, and the civil war which was then being commenced in America is still raging without any apparent sign of an end. The prophets of that time who prophesied the worst never foretold anything so black as this.

CHAPTER IX THE OLD KENNELS

Present continuously becomes past, and by the time we take stock of it we are in another present, consumed with planning the future, which we do on the stepping-stones of the past. The present is never here. We are hopelessly late for consciousness.

Yet though sorrow for the past could be quenched, dread of the future could not.

The past is usually the enemy of cheerfulness and cheerfulness is a most precious attainment. Personally, I could even go so far as to exhibit hostility toward grief and a marked hostility toward remorse—two states of mind which feed on the past instead of the present.