Quotes About Past

What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it".

When you're in political times, you want to reflect those political times, and sometimes going back to our past is the best way to look at our present.

Yesterday is another world. I want to go back there.

Some roads were easier to leave than others. Many walked to seek the future, but found only the past. Others sought the past, to make it new once more, and discovered that the past was nothing like the one they'd imagined. One could walk in search of friends, and find naught but strangers. One could yearn for company but find little but cruel solitude.

Because they imply a unity that does not exist. Only rarely does a life have a theme, and even then such themes exist in confusion and uncertainty, and are only described by others once that life has come to an end. A tale is the binding of themes to a past, because no tale can be told as it is happening.

Some roads were easier to leave than others. Many walked to seek the future, but found only the past. Others sought the past, to make it new once more, and discovered that the past was nothing like the one they'd imagined.

The past is a demon that not even death can shake.

Eventually every man reaches a point where every memory is unwelcome

We lie about our past to make peace with the present. If we accepted the truth of our history, we would find no peace – our consciences would not permit it. Nor would our rage.

upon what has gone before, and that one must be mindful of that at every moment, with every choice made and about to be made.

His old name was on the toll of the fallen, after all, and beside it was Blackdog Wood, 1159 Burn's Sleep.

The pot-thrower in the hut behind the shop, hands and forearms slick with clay, dreaming, yes, of the years in which a life took shape, when each press of a fingertip sent a deep track across a once smooth surface, changing the future, reshaping the past, and was this not as much chance as design? For all that intent could score a path, that the ripples sent up and down and outward could be surmised by decades of experience, was the outcome ever truly predictable?

Well, that's how the past is for most of us, Tammy. A jumbled collection of sordid stupidities, hopeless longings and hapless regrets.

A soul made weary longed for sordid ends. But a soul at its end longed for all that was past, and so remained trapped in a present filled with regrets.

Should you ever outrun the guilt within your past, Sorceress, you will have outrun your soul. When it finds you again, it will kill you.

Everything was about not-knowing, the whole future, and who could even make sense enough of the past to think they really knew everything and so, knowing everything, know everything to come?

I have lived centuries, yet what do I know of my own past? Where are my memories? How can I judge my own life without such knowledge?' 'Some would consider your curse a gift,' Mappo said, a flicker of sadness passing across his features.

Yet, when it's done, what is the once-soldier? What does he or she become? An entire future spent walking backward, eyes on the past – its horrors, its losses, its grief, its sheer heart-bursting living?

Badalle thought that Saddic's book should hold vast numbers of blank pages, to mark such silences and all they contained. The truths and the lies, the needs and the wants. The nows and the thens, the theres and the heres. If she saw such pages, and could crisp back each one, one after another, she would nod, remembering how it was. How it was.

The past was both dead and alive, but between them it was simply dead.

Most argument, and in fact most conflict, has nothing to do with the present. It's always about the past or the future. People can't agree on the details of what has happened or is going to happen. But we rarely know what has happened, and we never know what is going to happen. What is really at dispute is how we will deal with not knowing.

I especially object to having my character assassinated by reference to events from my past which bear absolutely no relationship to the question of who the anthrax killer is.

He walks through the house of his past, hoping he'll find the right door, hoping he'll find the key.

Without knowing the full extent of the past, we have no idea whether the events we can see are typical of larger patterns or simply contingent products of particular eras, societies, or conjunctures. A statistician might say that the sample from which historians generalize is seriously skewed for the simple reason that we have no idea how or by how much it is skewed! If that is true, it makes all the larger generalizations of historians suspect.