Quotes About Past

eighteenth century. It had never been planned; it had grown piecemeal, with past and present overlapping at every spot, and the final effect was one of jumbled and squalid grandeur.

Mientras volaba en silencio volvió la vista atrás, como si le persiguiera su miedo. Edmund Spenser

To those not yet old, being old means you've been. But being old also means that despite, in addition to, and in excess of your beenness, you still are. Your beenness is very much alive. You still are, and one is as haunted by the still-being and its fullness as by the having-already-been, by the pastness. Think of old age this way: it's just an everyday fact that one's life is at stake.

True, he had chosen to live alone, but not unbearably alone. The worst of being unbearably alone was that you had to bear it - either that or you were sunk. You had to work hard to prevent your mind from sabotaging you by its looking hungrily back at the superabundant past.

As far as I can see there is no conquering or exorcising the past with words - words born either of imagination or forthrightness.

There is no you, Maria, any more than there is a me. There is only this way that we have established over the months of performing together, and what it is congruent with isn't ourselves but past performances--we're has-beens at heart, routinely trotting out the old, old act.

Never before—the great refrain of 1942.

Those who seem to despise half of America will never be trusted to govern any of it. Those who cherish only the country's past will not be entrusted with its future.

But remember this: to have may be taken from you, to have had never.

Every Communist revolution begins as a rape of the present and continues as a cannibalization of the past.

If you have to invoke a distant past to justify a present grievance, the case for the grievance is already undermined.

We move in time, but God operates in eternity. He sees the end from the beginning. He cannot be taken by surprise, for our past, present, and future are before Him and in His grip all at once. An emergency to you or me is an opportunity in the great mosaic

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

There's no way to release yourself from a memory. It ends when it wants to end, whether it's in a flash or long after you've begged it to stop.

She is no longer a person in his life; instead, she is a person that other people will remind him of.

As we become the distant past, you become a future few of us would have imagined.

Now when I have to remember a date, all I have to do is consult my rap sheet.

What's gone is gone.

All this history...,' Danny says, then trails off. Lost in it. Feeling it connect. Realizing the weight of the world comes largely from its past.

I was treating the past as if it could be mined for clues, for reasons. But the past resists that. It holds too much evidence of too many things.

The past and the future are what's complicated. It's the present that's simple. And the simplicity is the sensation of it being just her and me.

This is what a small victory feels like. It feels like a little surprise and a lot of relief. It makes the past feel lighter and the future seem even lighter than that, if only for a moment. It feels like rightness winning. It feels like possibility.

I know I shouldn't be doing this. I know I'm poking a wound, not healing it. I know there's no way to have a future with Rhiannon. All I'm doing is extending the past by a day.

There's no way to release yourself from a memory. It ends when it wants to end, whether it's in a flash or long after you've begged it to stop. What was the next line? What did I say to you then? I probably changed the subject, and the new subject wasn't worth remembering.