Quotes About Past

Things didn't quite work out at Manchester United for various reasons, but that's in the past.

I don't want to marry again. I did that.

I was born to strange sights. Things invisible to see . . . I know where all past years are, and who cleft the Devil's foot.

You can't alter the past. The only thing you can alter is the future. People write stories pretending you can alter the past, but it can't be done. All you can do to the past is remember it wrong or interpret it differently, and that's no good to us.

Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly?

Readers, continued Miss Winter, are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay. That's why I couldn't have journalists and biographers rummaging around in my past, retrieving bits and pieces of it, preserving it in their words. To write my books, I needed my past left in peace, for time to do its work.

The end of my nine o'clocks was another anchor in time gone.

Helena was very quiet these days. She seemed pleased about the baby, talked from time to time about plans for their lives to come, but her liveliness had gone. Future life and past losses coexisted in her, two halves of a single experience, and she bore her grief and her hope in a subdued manner.

He raised his head to work out whether the memory was genuine or whether it was some reverse echo by which the present seems to duplicate itself in the past.

It was odd to think that only a few years ago she had been Helena Greville. It seemed a lot longer. When she thought about that girl now it was as if she was thinking about someone she used to know, and know quite well, but would never see again. Helena Greville was gone for good.

He was the first of my ghosts.

No hay una vieja casa que no tenga sus historias; no existe una vieja casa que no tenga sus fantasmas.

I felt a strange sensation inside. Like the past coming to life. The watery stirring of a previous life turning in my belly, creating a tide that rose in my veins and sent cool wavelets to lap at my temples. The ghastly excitement of it.

The past had no hold on him. Perhaps that's why his vision of the future was so strong. Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly? You

The only good thing about the good old days is they're gone.

Pero mi vida no sólo está acechada por el porvenir, también lo está por los fantasmas de mi propio pasado, que surgieron luego del deceso de quien encarnaba todo lo que yo había querido abandonar, todo con lo que había querido romper y que, seguramente, había constituido para mí una suerte de modelo social negativo, un contrapunto en el trabajo que había llevado a cabo para crearme a mí mismo.

Eine Beleidigung ist ein Zitat aus der Vergangenheit. Ihre Bedeutung hat sie nur deshalb, weil sie von unzähligen Sprechern wiederholt worden ist.

Your memory rope may not contain a precise, photographic accounting of past events, because those moments become lost within seconds of anything that occurs. But still, your honest (if not accurate) memories will be attached to those knots, and those honest memories—along with reflection, examination, reconsideration—are precisely what the memoirist has to offer.

The legacy of the past is the foundation of the present.

Still, looking through the old volumes was soothing, because thinking of the past made the present seem a little less real.

I go backwards and forwards, recapturing the past, wondering about the future—and, most unreasonably, I find myself longing for the past more than for the future.

Murray said, 'I don't trust anybody's nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.

It is all falling indelibly into the past.

In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.