Quotes About Past

All we have to face in the future is what has happened in the past. It is unbearable.

I feel at once the need to die and be reborn one thousand years ago.

Fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced [...} It's only lately that I've realized that Winnicott is not suggesting that breakdowns do not recut. Now I see that he may be suggesting just the opposite: that a fear of breakdown in our past may be precisely what causes it to repeat in our future

Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter. A red part

That's because they're of the past. All photos of the past look melancholy and wistful precisely because they capture something that's gone.

She hates the way the people part to let them past and then, behind them, regroup, erasing their passage, as if it were nothing, as if it never were.

The spectre is speaking without a mouth, saying he will not come in, he cannot, and they, the inhabitants, are hereby ordered not to go out, not to take to the streets, but to remain indoors until the pestilence is past.

And if happiness should surprise you again, do not mention its previous betrayal. Enter into the happiness, and burst.

Come with me tonight so that we might make tonight a shared past, says the one afflicted with longing. I will come with you to make a shared tomorrow, says the one afflicted with love. She does not love the past and wants to forget the war that has ended. He fears tomorrow, because the war has not ended and he does not want to grow older.

Sentimentality and nostalgia are closely related. Kissing cousins. I have no time for nostalgia, though. Nostalgics believe the past is nicer than the present. It isn't. Or wasn't. Nostalgics want to cuddle the past like a puppy. But the past has bloody teeth and bad breath. I look into its mouth like a sorrowing dentist.

The past is a dark house, and we have only torches with dying batteries. It's probably best not to spend too much time in there in case the rotten floor gives way beneath our feet.

History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.

Ah, guilt and sorrow had dogged Juan's footsteps too, for he was not a Catholic who could rise refreshed from the cold bath of confession. Yet the banality stood: that the past was irrevocably past. And conscience had been given man to regret it only in so far as that might change the future. For man, every man, Juan seemed to be telling him, even as Mexico, must ceaselessly struggle upward. What was life but a warfare and a stranger's sojourn?

Abandoned weapons and corpses may be washed away, removed by animals, dismembered by the victors as trophies, or buried, burned, or otherwise disposed of by the vanquished after defeat. It is reasonable to expect that direct archaeological evidence of warfare will be limited, and that it will actually tend to underestimate the frequency and bloody nature of past conflicts.

It is not that I dwell on the past. But the past shapes the way we are in the present and the way we will become what we are destined to become. It is only because I have finally understood the past, accepted it, embraced it, that I can fully live in the moment. And hardly a moment goes by when I don't think about Emmett, and the lessons a son can teach a mother.

It takes time to heal the pain of loss, and then it takes time to heal the memory of the pain, and the belief that honour requires us to hold that pain for ever. Then it takes more time to find that the loves of our past can still be loved, that something new – or something old, rewoven – does not diminish them. And then while we may know that to be true for others, while we see it in others and want to speak of it daily, it is harder to see it equally in ourselves.

I was thinking that there's no point living in the past. The future is the only thing that matters, and that it's what you make it.

Weil Gottes Wort in der Geschichte und das heißt in der Vergangenheit zu uns gesprochen hat, darum ist die Erinnerung, die Wiederholung des Gelernten täglich nötige Übung.

I'm just like a dot separating two sentences swinging between the past and present of my life

Not what it could have been: It is what it was. And what it was is dead. Octavio Paz, Lesson of Things, 1955

Imposible mencionar a San Ángel sin recordar tiempos que pasaron y que, como las golondrinas de Bécquer, no volverán.

Incierto es, en verdad, lo porvenir. ¿Quién sabe lo que va a pasar? Pero incierto es también lo pretérito, ¿quién sabe lo que ha pasado?   ANTONIO MACHADO Juan de Mairena

Es difícil librarte de tu pasado.

The ages of life can be evoked independently from the progression that advancing age implies, by means of anticipation, which lays out a future, or memory, which recreates the past, and in any case, by letting the imagination play with time.