Quotes About Past

In this great day when most women wave banners of authenticity about our pasts, we crouch back from honesty about our presents. We'll tell you all about our broken places of yesterday but don't dare admit the limitations of our today.

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

If... if there is reincarnation, it's about forward motion. It has to be, or else we would all be forever stuck in the past.

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. —MARCEL PROUST, REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

We live in the present, we dream of the future, but we learn eternal truths from the past.

Principled Realism is merely a slogan; America First is a slogan with a past.

Those nostalgic for the region's good old days are not remembering; they're daydreaming.

ONE REASON, FRANKLY, IS DONALD TRUMP. IF WE THINK OF FASCISM as a wound from the past that had almost healed, putting Trump in the White House was like ripping off the bandage and picking at the scab.

If that is wisdom, then I will never be wise. I do not want a life that has no place for you in it. You will come back with me and take the place that is yours in my heart. No obligations to the past stand in the way. We will marry. ---Addis de Valence

I was a golden witch, who had no past at all.

Whatever she tried, my spells would hold. Not even Odysseus could talk his way past witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.

I looked down at my body, bare in the fire's light, and tried to imagine it written over with its history: my palm with its lightning streak, my hand missing its fingers, the thousand cuts from my witch-work, the gristled furrows of my father's fire, the skin of my face like some half-melted taper. And those were only the things that had left marks. […] I was a golden witch, who had no past at all.

Have you no memories?" 'I am made of memories.

There are middle-aged children who spend a part of every day thinking of their college or their war, but the ones who grow up to be men do not have this plaintive need for a flavor of past importance, and Callowell was one of these.

The problem with nostalgia is what we tend to do is only remember what you like and you forget the parts you didn't like

This is why, if you want to get to know someone, you need to know their story. Their life is a story. It, too, has a past and a future. It, too, unfolds in a series of scenes over the course of time.

Perhaps our brightest hope for the future lies in the lessons of the past. The people who have come to this country have made America, in the words of one perceptive writer, 'a heterogeneous race but a homogeneous nation.

The stories of past courage can define that ingredient- they can teach, they can offer hope, they can provide inspiration. But they cannot provide courage itself. For this each man must look into his own soul.

We lay on the ground and kissed. Perhaps you smile. That we only lay on the ground and kissed. You young people can lend your bodies now, play with them, give them as we could not. But remember that you have paid a price: that of a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion. It is not only species of animal that die out. But whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know. But pity yourself for what it did.

I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was.

You have shared your secret. I think you will find it to be an unburdening in many other ways. You have very considerable natural advantages. You have nothing to fear from life. A day will come when these recent unhappy years may seem no more than that cloud-stain over there upon Chesil Bank. You shall stand in sunlight—and smile at your own past sorrows.

Images are inherently fascistic because they overstamp the truth, however dim and blurred, of the real past experience; as if, faced with ruins, we must turn architects, not archeologists.

Nos falta confianza en el presente, en el momento actual, en la visión efectiva, porque nuestra cultura nos dice que debemos confiar solo en lo que se ha conseguido y explicado en el pasado, en lo que se ha formulado de forma pública, lo que se ha editado, lo que se ha expuesto siguiendo los parámetros de una perspectiva claramente artística o claramente científica.

Sau dac? cel puÈ›in aÈ™ fi evocat amintirea unui reproÈ™, ar fi fost mai bine decât aceast? înmormântare absolut?, aceast? minciun? neomeneasc?, tic?loas?, stuid?, c? trecutul nostru nu ar fi în acelaÈ™i timp prezentul nostru, c? ceea ce am f?cut sau am simÈ›it atunci a fost într-un fel r?u È™i absurd...imatur.