Quotes About Past

The best is not to remember that your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life and doings 'll be like thousands's and thousands'.

After wearing and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret that lonely inexperience could devise, common sense had illumined her. She felt that she would do well to be useful again—to taste anew sweet independence at any price. The past was past; whatever it had been, it was no more at hand. Whatever its consequences, time would close over them;

reminiscence is less an endowment than a disease...

what only hurts me now would torture and kill me then!

And the d'Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing.

To escape the past and all that appertained thereto was to annihilate it, and to do that she would have to get away

There was something of the habitude of the wild animal in the unreflecting instinct with which she rambled on—disconnecting herself by littles from her eventful past at every step, obliterating her identity.

Tuttavia era in quella valle che il suo dolore aveva preso forma e Tess non l'amava più come in passato; la bellezza per lei, come per tutti quelli che hanno esperienza, non stava nelle cose, ma in ciò che le cose simboleggiavano.

y empezaba a sentir añoranza por el mundo de antaño; como un ancla en un mar con mal tiempo.

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

Far from offering structures to any history of the past, this kind of desert emptiness and exile is akin to the wilderness traditions of the monastery and the desert fathers.

I like the immaterial world. I like to live among thoughts and images of the past and the possible, and even of the impossible, now and then.

Verhalen horen zich in het verleden af te spelen, en hoe verder het verleden, zou men kunnen zeggen, des te beter voor ze, in hun hoedanigheid van verhalen, én voor de verteller, wiens gemurmel de onvoltooid verleden tijd bezweert.

No seu sorriso e na sua voz talvez transparecesse um pouco da emoção que se produz quando, depois de prolongadas relações mudas, se profere a primeira palavra; é uma emoção sutil que secretamente inclui o passado inteiro no momento presente.

In all of us is the wish to return to the has-been and repeat it, that if it were once unblest it may now be blessed.

If we live with possibilities we are exiles from the present which is given us by God to be our own, homeless and displaced in a future or a past which are not ours because they are always beyond our reach. The present is our right place, and we can lay hands on whatever it offers us.

It was so clearly present that there was no necessity to allude to it, this sorry, complicated past, with all its confusions and misunderstandings and mistakes. It was as real and vivid and present as the memory of an automobile accident in the casualty ward where the victims are being brought back to life.

He decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.

The past, hey no shit, it's an open invitation to wine abuse.

It was as if whatever had happened had reached some kind of limit. It was like finding the gateway to the past unguarded, unforbidden because it didn't have to be. Built into the act of return finally was this glittering mosaic of doubt. Something like what Sauncho's colleagues in marine insurance liked to call inherent vice.

Nostalgia lurks, ready to ooze from ambush.

Sure, she knew folks who had no problem at all with the past. A lot of it they just didn't remember. Many told her, one way and another, that it was enough for them to get by in real time without diverting precious energy to what, face it, was fifteen or twenty years dead and gone. But for Frenesi the past was one her case forever, the zombie at her back, the enemy no one wanted to see, a mouth wide and dark as the grave.

His life had been tied to the past. He'd seen himself a point on a moving wavefront, propagating through sterile history—a known past, a projectable future. But Jessica was the breaking of the wave. Suddenly there was a beach, the unpredictable . . . new life.

Why? Why use the room as introduction to an apologia? Because the room, though windowless and cold at night, is a hothouse. Because the room is the past, though it has no history of its own. Because, as the physical being-there of a bed or horizontal plane determines what we call love; as a high place must exist before God's word can come to a flock and any sort of religion begin; so must there be a room, sealed against the present, before we can make any attempt to deal with the past.