Quotes About Past

Emelina and I took each other in. All morning I'd felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.

The past is all we know of the future.

My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me.

An imperfectly remembered life is a useless treachery. Every day, more fragments of the past roll around heavily in the chambers of an empty brain, shedding bits of color, a sentence or a fragrance, something that changes and then disappears. It drops like a stone to the bottom of the cave.

It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present." Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

According to her, if he hasn't been dead twenty years, he isn't history.

All morning I'd felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.

It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.

Because what would be left, when all these books were in the past? He lay awake nights dreading it.

Emelina and I took each other in. All morning I'd felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.

Memories, James thought, thank God we have them. They help us to recall what's long gone, and we can live again in the past with those we once loved.

long-ago lifetime.

To go in search of what once was is to postpone the difficulty of living with what is.

The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes once wrote that it was impossible for his country and the United States to have a productive conversation. Mexico, he said, is so burdened by its past it cannot easily imagine a future. The United States, he said, is so intent on imagining its future it isn't troubled by rewriting its past to serve that future.

WHEN PEOPLE EVALUATE AN EXPERIENCE, THEY ARE PERFORMING one or more of the following comparisons: Comparing the experience to what they hoped it would be Comparing the experience to what they expected it to be Comparing the experience to other experiences they have had in the recent past Comparing the experience to experiences that others have had

The other advantage of making the author a famous religious figure of the past is that such books often purport to tell the future.

collective memory, is essentially a reconstruction of the past that adapts the image of historical facts to the beliefs and spiritual needs of the present.

All I know is what's past is past, and what's ahead is ahead. The second is ka, and takes care of itself.

Sometimes you could get rid of the ghosts that were haunting your life if you could only work up enough courage to face them.

Sometimes, the past don't rest so easy. Why else do people study history?

At the same moment a cold chill traced a finger down the middle of my back. Sometimes things come back to you, that's all. Sometimes they come back.

It is as though there is a splinter working its way to the surface, only this splinter is in your soul. And just as the skin wants a foreign object gone and pushes it out, the soul wants to be healthy and will not leave you in peace until you stop drenching it with the poisons of your feelings about the past.

When you live out of your memory, you focus on the past. When you live out of your imagination, you focus on the future.

This power of choice means that we are not merely a product of our past or of our genes; we are not a product of how other people treat us. They unquestionably influence us, but they do not determine us. We are self-determining through our choices. If we have given away our present to the past, do we need to give away our future also?