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Quotes About Past

I realized that in order to touch the woman behind the grandmother I knew, the one who never spoke in a direct way about her past, I had to bring the pain of the past into the landscape of the present.
~ Unknown
I had been privy to some of her intense sensory images, to her telescopic memory, to Genocide flashbacks. This was how she told me about her past. I think it was the only way she knew to speak to me about something she wanted to say, but couldn't say in any other language to a young boy, her eldest grandson.
~ Unknown
The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future.
~ Peter Benchley
We are prisoners of the future because we will be ensnared by our past.
~ Peter L. Bernstein
not yet been realized or because it is in danger of disappearing from human sight: the stability of a tradition, which has its roots not only in a historical or cultural past, but within the innermost being of man. . . ."2
~ Peter Matthiessen
To ensure that we don't merely exist in the dead present? ... That the oblivion of the now as opposed to the ecstasy of looking back--but wait, wait, if the present is the past, you fool, dissolving this very moment--then it is incumbent upon us now, now, to create the past--so obvious! so rudimentary!--it's the uncreated past that is dead [Walt Kaplan/August, Bedroom]
~ Peter Orner
Those old songs certainly brought back memories. Why did the past always seem so much brighter than the present? Because he had been more innocent then?
~ Peter Robinson
Friends Reunited dot com.
~ Peter Robinson
How easily something you thought was safely buried in your past could suddenly come back and cut you to the quick.
~ Peter Robinson
There is another use of the term 'human', one proposed by Joseph Fletcher, a major figure in the development of bioethics. Fletcher compiled a list of what he called 'Indicators of Humanhood' that includes the following: self-awareness, self-control, a sense of the future, a sense of the past, the capacity to relate to others, concern for others, communication and curiosity.
~ Peter Singer
The past is over, the future hasn't happened yet, the only time is right now. This can be your threshold moment of change. The next year of your life is going to go by whether you're doing something about your weight or not. Now
~ Phil McGraw
Once in a while, I found flint arrowheads in the muddy creek bank. Looking at them, I would dream of that savage, heroic time and wish I had lived then, before America became a land of salesmen and shopping centers.
~ Philip Caputo
You admit, then, that your world is not real? That it is a forgery? Zina hesitated. It branched off at crucial points, due to our interference with the past. Call it magic if you want or call it technology;
~ Philip K. Dick
he could remember the prewar days, the other times. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the World's Fair; the former better world.
~ Philip K. Dick
Eventually he forgot what event had started off his decline into entropy; God mercifully occludes us to the past as well as the future.
~ Philip K. Dick
strictly speaking, the ability to travel through time . . . for instance, she can't go into the future. In a certain sense, she can't go into the past either; what she does, as near as I can comprehend it, is start a counter-process that uncovers the prior stages inherent in configurations of matter. But
~ Philip K. Dick
It's—it's a variable." Kaplan was shaking, white-lipped and pale. "Something from which no inference can be made. The man from the past. The machines can't deal with him. The variable man!
~ Philip K. Dick
Maybe, he pondered as he ascended the stairs, that's my problem with Kathy. I can't remember our combined past: can't recall the days when we voluntarily lived with each other... now it's become an involuntary arrangement, derived God knows how from the past.
~ Philip K. Dick
I once saw a ballgame.
~ Philip K. Dick
The past is latent, is submerged, but still there, capable of rising to the surface once the later imprinting unfortunately - and against ordinary experience - vanished. The man contains - not the boy - but earlier men, he thought. History began a long time ago.
~ Philip K. Dick
There is little future, Mike thought, for someone who is dead. There is, usually, only the past.
~ Philip K. Dick
Tolkien, who created this marvellous vehicle, doesn't go anywhere in it. He just sits where he is. What I mean by that is that he always seems to be looking backwards, to a greater and more golden past; and what's more he doesn't allow girls or women any important part in the story at all. Life is bigger and more interesting than The Lord of the Rings thinks it is.
~ Philip Pullman
Perhaps some particles move backward in time; perhaps the future affects the past in some way we don't understand; or perhaps the universe is simply more aware than we are.
~ Philip Pullman
Perhaps some particles move backwards in time; perhaps the future affects the past in some way we don't understand; or perhaps the universe is simply more aware than we are. There are many things we haven't yet learned how to read.
~ Philip Pullman