Quotes About Past

My skin has the crinkled appearance of wax paper that someone has tried to flatten and reuse. My eyes fail me often—in the darkness, when headlights flash, when rain falls. It is unnerving, this new unreliability in my vision. Perhaps that's why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present.

You know the thing about history, Elsa? It's over. Already dead and gone." "They say people who don't heed history are doomed to repeat it." "Who says that? I ain't never heard it. I say folks who hang on to the past miss their chance for a future.

it's always about family. The past has an irritating way of becoming the present.

Sooner or later, Meg, it's always about family. The past has an irritating way of becoming the present.

The waters of the past were as cold as she'd expected, even in the heat of this gorgeous summer morning.

Memories--even the best of them--faded.

He was trying to make it up to her, asking for forgiveness and seeking redemption all at once, sacrificing himself for her. It was a glimpse of who he'd once been, the poet her maman had fallen in love with. That man, the one before the war, might have known another way, might have found the perfect words to heal their fractured past.

Lately, though, I find myself thinking about the war and my past, about the people I lost. Lost. It makes it sound as if I misplaced my loved ones; perhaps I left them where they don't belong and then turned away, too confused to retrace my steps. They are not lost. Nor are they in a better place. They are gone. As I approach the end of my years, I know that grief, like regret, settles into our DNA and remains forever a part of us.

question was gone, tossed onto the pile of lost chances that made up Before.

She'd rather have nightmares about Randall Flagg or Carrie or Jack Torrance than about her own past.

They say people who don't heed history are doomed to repeat it.

You know the thing about history, Elsa? It's over. Already dead and gone.

Honestly, she tried never to think about the girl she'd once been, and her life in that tract house in Rancho Flamingo. Sobriety didn't make it easier to look back. The opposite was true, in fact. Now she lived her life in moments, in breaths drawn and released, in drinks not sipped and bowls of pot not smoked. Every dry second was a triumph.

Los recuerdos - incluso los más bellos - se desvanecen.

We all suffer losses. But it is how we choose to move ahead that matters, isn't it? We must honor the past without turning our backs on the future.

It's not the decisions in your past that matter, but the choices you make about your future.

We must honor the past without turning our backs on the future.

And though grief weighed her down—she couldn't take a step without seeing Sister Maria Andrzeja's empty eyes—she also felt lighter, untethered at last from a past that had always been an invisible weight. She was not Jerusza's—she never had been, and she knew that now. But neither was she her German father's. She belonged only to herself, a dove of the dark forest, the forest that called to her now.

Often, the roles I'm offered in England are melancholic women who are filled with regret for the past, regret for their fading beauty.

But the past determines who we are, and it has led to this sartling future.

If you're young, and have grown up only since the Internet has been dissolving the distinctions between past and present and old and new, the sci-fi writer and futurist William Gibson says, "I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory.

As one of those scholars recently summarized the corpus of studies and experiments, the more that change "makes people anxious about the world and their place in it" and causes "major disruptions and uncertainties in their lives," then "the more they longed nostalgically…for the comparative safety and security of a perceived past.

En aquel instante, en lo más recóndito de mi corazón, se abrió un agujero tan pequeño como el pinchazo de un alfiler. Y, como si se tratara de un agujero negro, en un instante lo engulló todo. El paisaje de alrededor, el tiempo transcurrido. Y, mientras yo mismo era absorbido hacia aquel pasado que tan lejano me había parecido, resurgió... [su] voz...

The toughest part of life isn't death after all. It's living and dealing with our pasts.