Quotes About Past

THE FIRST THING TO put into your past and keep there are the bad suggestions others have shared with you.

I know that I'm fond of saying this repeatedly, but the best thing about the past is that it's over and when it's not over something is amiss in your mind. It's not the original event or perpetrator that's making you remember—it's you, inside your own mind, holding on to terrible memories. None of us are exempt from this.

This will instruct your neurology which direction to go in. There is a tendency for some people to look at the past over and over again. Even in therapy, people going through it over and over again instruct the neurology that this is what they want. Until you start to look ahead with desire, it's very hard to get away from the past. The more you look at the bad things, the more you relive the bad things, the more familiar it gets.

You can't revisit a place where you were happy, as you can't re-love someone you've loved and left" ~from "Package Tour

A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.

In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss.

The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything. There is never any more beauty than there is now. There is no more joy or wonder or sorrow than there is now, nor perfection, nor any more evil nor any more good than there is now.

Our ex-wifes always harbour secrets about us that make them irresistable. Until, of course, we remember who we are and what we did and why we are not married anymore.

History envelops the past in uncertainty, like the mist obscuring the beech trees in the valley below me. The deeper the history, the more the outlines blur, the more inferences about the past are subject to change.

And there is an earlier Wilson cycle, too, a billion years old, entrapped alongside the Appalachians: the Grenville, which rises to the surface in Central Park, New York, to remind us that the human and urban is no more than foam on the sea of the past.

He wrote to his mother that even though the prize had gone in the past to writers he despised, it pleased him: 'I suppose at the bottom of every human mind is the rather degraded love of success – any kind of success. One feels ashamed of one's own pleasure.'39

It is strange that the mind will forget so much, and yet hold a picture of flowers that have been dead for thirty years or more...

How green was my Valley, then, and the Valley of them that have gone.

No, no, there was danger there. It was thinking of the past that drove him to the bottle. He was just going to have to accept the present.

he'd thought the past was dead. How long did it take for a past to die? She

He was getting disgusted at this increasing nostalgic preoccupation with the past. It was a weakness, he knew, a weakness he could scarcely afford if he intended to go on. And yet he kept discovering himself drifting into extensive meditation on aspects of the past. It was almost more than he could control, and it was making him furious with himself.

Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you're free. But a few measures more, and the cloak of time closes back around you.

Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you're free.

She must still discover that myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions.

If the past is older than the present, then the future must be younger. And we must all go backward with each passing year.

All that's left to sell up here is nostalgia, those recent yesterdays when tomorrow seemed the answer to everything a human might ever want.

Earth's atmosphere at different times in history." You can't predict the past, Dad. "You can if you don't know it yet.

The past tries to kill her—all the people they were or had hoped to be.

These people are nothing to Plant-Patty. And yet their lives have long been connected, deep underground. Their kinship will work like an unfolding book. The past always comes clearer, in the future.