Quotes About Past

The engines engaged and started to spin up, and the strangest thing happened: a wave surged inside of me, almost new to me. Anticipation. This felt like running, all right, running away from my past and everything in it. Racing full speed towards the unknown. I was good at running.

Gwen Proctor is the fourth identity I've had since leaving Wichita. Gina Royal lies dead in the past; I'm not that woman anymore. In fact, I can hardly recognize her now, that weak creature who'd submitted, pretended, smoothed over every ripple of trouble that rose.

For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future.

The girl is dressed in a flannel shirt, and I can't tell whether that's because she's trying to bring back the only fashion style of the past fifty years that hasn't been brought back or whether it's because the shirt is as damn comfortable as it looks.

There's a hole in you where your heart once was. And in its place, you've put history.

history, soulless god though it was, never failed to offer what must be understood.

To believe in luck, you must believe that the universe is a roulette wheel and that instead of paying out to us what we have earned, it pays out only what it wishes. But it is not a spinning wheel of chance, it is a work of art, complete and framed by eternity. He said that because we live in time, we think that the past is baked and served and eaten, that the present is coming out of the oven in continuous courses, and that the future is not yet even in the mixing bowl. Any

We ate food that wasn't healthy. We let dirty dishes stack up in the sink. We slept too much. We talked about everything, everything but the slaughter at the mall. Our past, our future. We planned. We dreamed.

our nature and purpose is, more than anything else, to love and to make love, to take joy from the beauty of the world, to live with an awareness that the future is not as real a place for any one of us as are the present and the past.

Some felt that perhaps in his past lay a tragedy with which he had never been able to make his peace, that the only companion with which he felt comfortable was sorrow.

Nowhere can a secret keep Always secret, dark and deep, Half so well as in the past, Buried deep to last, to last. Keep it in your own dark heart. Otherwise the rumors start. After many years have buried Secrets over which you worried, No confidant can then betray All the words you didn't say. Only you can then exhume Secrets safe within the tomb Of memory, of memory, Within the tomb of memory. -The Book of Counted Sorrows

Sudden falls can come to societies that know too little history or that have furnished their minds with easy one-note propaganda in place of the true complexity and terrible beauty of the storied past.

I swung up and into this most inadequate of hidey-holes and lowered the lid, closing myself in the feed bin with the hope that its name wouldn't prove to be as apt now as it had been in the past.

I'd guess that what's behind you is much more than what lies ahead, though you have a way to go yet.

The past was a trove of hard-won wisdom.

The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. —H. G. Wells

anachronistic

The thing pursuing him, however, was not only his past but also his fate, and the rails that led away from it also led inexorably to it.

in the middle of that highway nineteen years earlier.

To speak of the past, to describe her ordeal, she has nothing but words, and words are insufficient to the task; mere words will reduce the sacred to tabloid-newspaper sensationalism. And then she'll have nothing.

Her signature style is hyperrealism, an attempt to capture everything a photograph might and then much more: what the mind knows about a scene that the scene itself does not reveal; what the heart feels about the subject before it; how the past lives in the present and how the future looms real but unrevealed; what any moment on the Earth might mean, if it means anything at all.

Anyway, the human heart being what it was, those who erased the past would in fact purge only the wisdom and preserve the evils.

all of time—past, present, and future—was complete in the instant of the big bang. Therefore the past and the future were contained in the present. If the future of this timeline was here to be known right now, there might be people gifted enough to see what most could not.

We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it represents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was the 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.