Quotes About Past

Here memory was simply a cold cloud to be shuddered at.

The past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.

Brooding about the past is so often fantasy of how one might have won and resentment that one didn't. It is that resentment which one so often mistakes for repentance

Never swim in a rough sea, dear boy, this sea's a killer. But the past refused to come back, as it did in dreams, to be remade. Titus walked in my dreams in the brightness of his youth, which was now made eternal. Or else I dreamed that he was dead and felt joy on waking.

Good-bye to the past, with its mysteries which would never be fully unfolded.

The past and present are after all so close, almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.

That love all belonged to the elapsed moment.

How could he assess her like this because of something which had happened in the past? The past was never real for Dora. The notion that Paul might keep her past alive to torment her with, now occurred to her for the first time.

There are those who, even if valued, remain sinister witnesses from the past. James is for me such a witness. It is not even clear whether we like each other. If I were told today that James was dead my first emotion might be pleasurable; though how much does this prove?

I felt a tenderness for her that was deep and pure, a miracle of love preserved. How clear it flowed, that fountain from the far past. Yes, we must quietly collect our past, collect it up with tacit understanding, without any intensity or drama, blaming and exonerating ourselves with a difference. And how wonderfully possible it seemed, this silent process of redemption

The past is gone, it doesn't exist any more.

Things which he and she had done and been in years past were having their deep inevitable consequences.

The past buries the past and must end in silence, but it can be a conscious silence that rests open-eyed.

She could find no emotional connection though, between the her of now and the her of then

La vita si può capire solo riandando indietro, ma devi viverla andando avanti.

the happiness and love that once lived here

Don't you see? It's Galaxy-wide. It's a worship of the past. It's a deterioration - a stagnation!

You are a practical man, Elijah. You do not moon romantically over Earth's past, despite your healthy interest in it. Nor do you stubbornly embrace the City culture of Earth's present day. We felt that people such as yourself were the ones that could lead Earthmen to the stars once more.

It is always useful, you see, to subject the past life of reform politicians to rather inquisitive research.

There is a longing for a supposedly simple and virtuous past that is almost universal among the people of a complex and vicious society.

They (Medievalists) are soft, dreamy people who find life too hard for them here and get lost in an ideal world of the past that never really existed.

He also said, I suppose there are people who are so `lucky' that they are not touched by phantoms and are not troubled by fleeting memory and know not nostalgia and care not for the ache of the past and are spared the feather-hit of the sweet, sweet pain of the lost, and I am sorry for them-for to weep over what is gone is to have had something prove worth the weeping.

Here in the Periphery they've lost nuclear power. In Gamma Andromeda, a power plant has undergone meltdown because of poor repairs, and the Chancellor of the Empire complains that nuclear technicians are scarce. And the solution? To train new ones? Never! Instead they're to restrict nuclear power." And for the third time: "Don't you see? It's Galaxy-wide. It's a worship of the past. It's a deterioration—a stagnation!

There was so much more in the past, so much less in the future, that the mind turned away from the looming shadow ahead to contemplate the safety of what had gone before.