Quotes About Past

As far as past men go, I loved Jeff Hardy. He reminds me of my husband in a way. He's quieter but has a presence in the ring that's, like, wow.

Thinking about time travel may seem like something humans have been doing since the first caveman dropped the first rock on his foot. But, even to begin to imagine the possibility of time travel, your mind must be able to wrap itself around the notion of a past and a future.

I'd love to wrestle a Bruiser Brody or Andre the Giant from the past.

I go back and watch a lot of the stuff that I did back in the day, and it was a lot of wrestling just to show that I could wrestle. And I realized that sort of stuff is sort of pointless.

I'm what you call a washed-up wrestler.

As long as 'Pearl Harbor' stays in the past, it's perfect; when it wretchedly changes gears in the late going, it becomes the wrong kind of same old story: Hollywood stupidity and callowness, writ large across the sky.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

I've never believed it's a fiction writer's job to create an exact replica of the past, a diorama the reader can step right into. But it is my responsibility to learn everything of the world I'm writing about, to become an expert in the politics and history that formed my characters' identities.

Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.

By all means, let us study the great writers of the past for their own sakes, but let us study them for our guidance: that we, in our turn, having (it is to be hoped) something to say in our span of time, say it worthily, not dwindling out the large utterance of Shakespeare or of Burke.

Proust writes, he remembers, physically. He depends on his body to give him the information that will bring him to the past. His book is called 'In Search of Lost Time,' and he does it through the senses. He does it through smell. He does it through feeling. He does it through texture. It is all physically driven, that language.

The great thing about using the past is that it gives you the most colossal freedom to invent. The research is necessary, of course, but no one writes a novel to dramatically illustrate what everybody already knows.

Every musician writes about past relationships. And other than that, I can promise you, I have very little in common with Taylor Swift.

History must share with reading, writing and arithmetic first rank as the most important subjects in the curriculum. Understanding the issues on which citizens of a republic are expected to vote is impossible without an understanding of the past.

Writing the past is never a neutral act. Writing always asks the past to justify itself, to give its reasons... provided we can live with the reasons. What we want is a narrative, not a log; a tale, not a trial. This is why most people write memoirs using the conventions not of history, but of fiction.

Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.

Your childhood, said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn't chosen to retail at drink parties. Her words lulled him. The past, even a bitter past, is usually more pungent than the present, or at least better organized in the mind.

In dreams, time may eddy and distort, but even when it traffics in the past, it does so in the guise of the present moment

The last light with any real warmth had been at home, long ago, in a place and a time that no longer existed, with people whose names he didn't say even inside his own mind.

He felt a wistfulness for things lost and irretrievable.

I had the courage to look backward The ghosts of my days

This was how they wished they had been: each was creating an ideal into which he was now fitting his past life.

The tenderness of the old days came back to their hearts, full and silent as the flowing river, with the softness of the perfume of the syringas, and threw across their memories shadows more immense and more sombre than those of the still willows that lengthened out over the grass.

As my body continues on its journey, my thoughts keep turning back and bury themselves in days past. [To his mother, Novemeber 23, 1849]