Quotes About Past

the history is there, but it's not visible.

Why was I thinking about this? Oh, yes—the roses. Something to keep. Something gone.

once time is lit, it will burn whether or not you're breathing it in. even after smoke becomes air there is the memory of smoke.

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.

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

Defunct, adj. You brought home a typewriter for me.

I am not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present, because that is where I am destined to live.

The mind was a capricious and undisciplined creature. You couldn't always keep it on a lead, and it was for ever dashing off into the undergrowth of the past, digging up some decayed bone of memory, and bringing it back, with tail wagging, to lay it at your feet.

En la historia de los 3.5 mil millones de años de vida en la Tierra, somos la primera especie con la facultad de controlar nuestro destino. La perspectiva de hacerlo será excelente en la medida en que conozcamos nuestro pasado evolutivo.

He considers turning back but he knows what lies behind him and he wants no part of it. Just as it wants no part of him.

If I could go back would I do it differently? Well, I can't go back.

Troy itself was disappointingly small. Like little more than your ordinary city block and a few stories in height, practically. Although now that I remember, everything in William Shakespeare's house at Stratford-on-Avon was astonishingly tiny, too. As if only imaginary people had lived there then. Or perhaps it is only the past itself, which is always smaller than one had believed.

Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn't live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at.

I'd think it strange that the boardinghouse attracted both him and me, but that's what cheap places do -- draw in people with no money. An apartment of my own was unthinkable at that time of my life, and even if I'd found an affordable one it wouldn't have satisfied my fundamental need to live in a communal past, or what I imagined the past to be like: a world full of antiques.

Hey," he said, "that's where we used to go when we were a family.

Mis queridos niños carecen de imaginación, el único futuro que conciben es idéntico al pasado

Hemos convertido el presente en algo de lo que huir a toda prisa, aunque sea hacia el pasado.

It is not well to forget the past," Douglass warned in a speech later in the 1880s. "Memory was given to man for some wise purpose. The past is . . . the mirror in which we may discern the dim outlines of the future and by which we may make them more symmetrical.

Well the nation may forget; it may shut its eyes to the past, but the colored people of this country are bound to keep fresh a memory of the past till justice shall be done them in the present."39

Douglass insisted on remembrance before any action: "Perhaps there is too much past. But remember that all the present rests on all the past. Remember is as good a word as forget.

For black Americans, Exodus is always contemporary, history always past and present.

Victor smiled politely in return, the way someone smiles when they're thanked for having done a minor favor in times past. Held open a door in the rain, lent someone a small amount of money, butchered an ex-lover, that sort of thing.

We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it represents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was progress in it? Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances.

Although she had resisted this knowledge all her life, had lived determinedly in the future focused there by ambition, she understood at last that this was the real condition of humanity: The dance of life occurred not yesterday or tomorrow, but only here at the still point that was the present. This truth is simmple, sel-evident, but difficult to accept, for we sentimentalize the past and wallow in it, while we endure the moment and in every waking hour dream of the future.