Quotes About Past

The pressure on her arm brought Etta back onto the uncomfortable wooden pew. But she didn't want to stay there, so she climbed back out the window, through the glass eyes of the seven-foot Good Shepherd, and started again the futile weaving of invisible ifs and slippery mights into an equally unattainable past.

In the telling, it seemed I was back there once more.

I can't change the past.

It only underscores the feeling that everything from our past has vanished.

Academics have given up trying to recover an honest picture of the past and have decided that their history-writing should be simply an instrument of moral hand-wringing.

But then Americans have always lived entirely in the present, and this generation is no different from mine except that now there is more of a past for them to ignore.

But then what are memories but shadows of objects gone to dust? Or

And at some length Dr. Bogart spoke of a period in which skies were bluer, water purer, potatoes better-grained than now. I know the speech. It is the tirade of the old.

Because stories are how we share our lives and what we truly mourn when they are lost. Stories are what connect us to our past and carry us to our future. They are what we cherish and what we remember.

For all the pious sloganeering that accompanied it, the struggle was only incidentally one between Islam and Christianity. Territory was the aim, along with something less tangible but equally compelling: the right to claim the legacy of the Roman Empire…. Had not… Mehmed the Conqueror toppled the Byzantines and seized Constantinople two centuries before? Far from wishing to obliterate the Byzantine past, the Ottomans meant to assume it as their own…

She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn't living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present - she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation.

St. Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn't exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist.

Men can become twins with age. The past was their common womb; the six months of rain and the six months of sun was the period of their common gestation. They needed only a few words and a few gestures to convey their meaning. They had graduated through the same fevers, they were moved by the same love and contempt.

D. felt a little envious of him as he stood there in the yard among the cars — he looked established. Five hundred years of inbreeding had produced him, set him against an exact background, made him at home, and at the same a time haunted — by the vices of ancestors and the tastes of the past.

St Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn't exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist.

She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn't living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present—she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation.

For more than half a century, [...] American archaeology was so riddled with pre-formed opinions about how the past should look, and about the orderly, linear way in which civilizations should evolve, that it repeatedly missed, sidelined, and downright ignored evidence for any human presence at all prior to Clovis--until, at any rate, the mass of that evidence became so overwhelming that it took the existing paradigm by storm.

Integral to it is the parallel assumption of gradualism, namely that "the present is the key to the past" and that the rate of change observable today is an accurate guide to rates of change that prevailed in the past.

Ignorance of the universe's workings had created false gods in man's ancient past, and the understanding of them was calculated to destroy them.

When the future remains so unclear, why does the past so often intrude? Because it is all that is definite.

Axonn sighed. Just like the good old days, he said. Now I remember why I hated them so much.

The past is never dead. It's not even past; if it were there would be no grief or sorrow.

For nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost. There is always the clue, the canceled check, the smear of lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed, the condom on the park path, the twitch in the old wound, the baby shoes dipped in bronze, the taint in the blood stream. And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. —Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

Given the nature of the mind, we'll consider the dreams of sleep to be the past, never quite accurate in recollection, always made to serve our desires (except when haunting us for our sins). And the wakeful present . . . well, it, too, holds its dangers.