Quotes About Past

The fundamentalist (or, more accurately, the beleaguered individual who comes to embrace fundamentalism) cannot stand freedom. He cannot find his way into the future, so he retreats to the past. He returns in imagination to the glory days of his race and seeks to reconstitute both them and himself in their purer, more virtuous light. He gets back to basics. To fundamentals.

The enemy wants us unable to forget the terrible things that occurred in the past and instead remember them as though they happened yesterday. God has healing for upsetting memories.

The enemy wants to steal our peace and keep us stirred up, anxious, fearful, upset, and always in a stance of waiting for something terrible to happen at any minute. The enemy wants us unable to forget the terrible things that occurred in the past and instead remember them as though they happened yesterday.

So much of the past in encapsulated in the odds and ends. Most of us discard more information about ourselves than we ever care to preserve. Our recollection of the past is not simply distorted by our faulty perception of events remembered but skewed by those forgotten. The memory is like twin orbiting stars, one visible, one dark, the trajectory of what's evident forever affected by the gravity of what's concealed.

I wish life could be edited as deftly as prose. It would be nice to go back and write a better story, correcting weaknesses and follies in the light of what I now know. What I've noticed though is that any attempt to trim out the dark matter takes away some of the good that was also buried in the muck. The past is a package deal and I don't believe there's a way to tell some of the truth without telling most.Wisdom comes at a price, and I have paid dearly for mine.

I think you'd best make your peace with the past since you've come this far. I think you know by now that you won't go back again.

Which strategy we adopt when we feel disconnected—becoming demanding and critical or withdrawing and shutting down—partly reflects our natural temperament, but mostly it is dictated by the lessons we learn in the key attachment relationships of our past and present.

the way she felt about her past was that she had somehow come into being who she was without any connection to it. As if floating in naked and unencumbered on some shell

everything that had ever passed between us was present then, that it was hidden somewhere among the suffering.

When I visited either of the two Koreas I always imagined that I was traveling back to my roots and would discover new truths about my past. Now it occurred to me that the past I was seeking had for many years been buried under and overtaken by American and Chinese influences. The Korea of my imagination existed only in paintings, history books, the memories of older generations, and in the remnants that I glimpsed, every now and then, like shards of glass poking out from the buried past.

The past was all right there before me: generations of Koreans separated by division; decades of longing, loss, hurt, regret, guilt.

But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life.

one must forget the past—more accurately, one must remember the necessity of forgetting.

In 1820, the average amount an individual drank in one day was more than three times the average today.119

Great-Uncle Merry stopped reading; but the children sat as still and speechless as if his voice still rang on. The story seemed to fit so perfectly into the green land rolling below them that it was as if they sat in the middle of the past.

As you gain more control over your past and present relationship with your parents, you will discover that your other relationships, especially your relationship with yourself, will improve dramatically. You will have the freedom, perhaps for the first time, to enjoy your own life.

the past still held secrets, the past threw its shadows...

Places are often filled with their own pasts and exude a sense of them, an atmosphere of great good or great evil, which can be picked up by anyone sensitive to their surroundings.

It was the past, the uncomplicated past seen far away at the end of the golden corridor of nostalgia

They say people who don't learn from history are destined to repeat it.

Everyone has a past, she reminded herself. If only she could have a good one. One that was exciting and involved pirates or space creatures.

The past existed. There was no going back. No undoing. There was only moving forward and hoping it all got better.

Please don't let the unhappiness you knew in the past keep you from accepting happiness now.

To have a museum chronicling the great crime that was African slavery in the United States of America would be to acknowledge that the evil was here . Americans prefer to picture the evil that was there , and from which the United States-a unique nation, one without any certifiably wicked leaders throughout its entire history-is exempt. That this country, like every other country, has its tragic past does not sit well with the founding, and still all-powerful belief in American exceptionalism.