Quotes About Past

The thing about kicking open a door to the past is that sometimes what's behind it comes out under its own power.

behind them.

William Faulkner ever said wasn't written in one of his novels, but spoken during an interview in Paris: The past is never dead; it's not even past.

The past is always with us, darling," Tom went on. "Sometimes we carry it lightly, but other times it's like dragging a wounded brother behind you.

His physical body, this physical body was not—could not be—in the past. But gravity could. Like Tars said, gravity cut across and through all of the dimensions. When he punched at one of them, what he was really doing was sending a pulse through space-time, a gravitic surge that was responsible for moving the books.

The written word is all that stands between memory and oblivion. Without books as our anchors, we are cast adrift, neither teaching nor learning. They are windows on the past, mirrors on the present, and prisms reflected all possible futures. Books are lighthouses erected on the dark sea of time.

The Germans have national amnesia where the war is concerned.

But learned personality traits aren't often based on present reality but on a past from which there is no escape.

in, and while she'd been

While the true God lives in the now, false gods always live in the past or future. Chasing them to find our worth and significance always takes us out of the present moment.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on. But everythign has its cause and its meaning. Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see.

Regret is a ghost of love. Regret is a nicer self that we send into the past from time to time, even though we know it's too late to change what we said, or did. We do it because it's human: a thing of our kind. We do it because we care, drawn by threads of shame that only fray and wither in the sea of regret.

Most of us pretend, with greater or lesser success, that the minute we live in is something we can share. But the past for every one of us is a desert island.

We can deny the past, but we can't escape its torment because the past is a speaking shadow that keeps pace with the truth of what we are, step for step, until we die.

each one of us, we all have to earn our future,' she said slowly. 'I think the future is like anything else that's important. It has to be earned. If we don't earn it, we don't have a future at all. And if we don't earn it, if we don't deserve it, we have to live in the present, more or less forever. Or worse, we have to live in the past. I think that's probably what love is—a way of earning the future.

But the past has a way of taking you to the right place at the wrong time, and that can be a storm inside.

Every door is a portal leading through time as well as space. The same doorway that leads us into and out of a room also leads us into the past of the room and its ceaselessly unfolding future.

His face was unmarked, his skin showing no scar or scratch or faded bruise. It occurred to me, as I listened to his genial chatter, that it was likely he'd never been in a fight, or even closed his fist in anger. I envied him. When I allowed myself to look into the half-collapsed tunnel of the past, it seemed that I'd been fighting all my life.

Il passato si riflette perennemente in due specchi: quello luminoso delle parole pronunciate e delle azioni compiute e quello scuro, colmo di tutte le cose che non abbiamo detto o fatto.

We can deny the past, but we can't escape its torment because the past is a speaking shadow that keeps pace with the truth of what we are, step for step, until we die.

The heartbeat of any conscious now is poised on the same choice that hope gives all of us, between shadows of the past, and the bright, blank page of any new day.

Any dark past is a vampire, feeding on the blood of the living moment, and letters are the bats.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on. But everything has its cause and its meaning. Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end.

I've got issues of my own—things in my past I'd rather not go back to. Things I won't go back to.