Quotes About Past

Americans really believe that the past is past, he writes. They do not care to know that the past soaks the present like the light of a distant star. Things that are over do not end. They come inside us, and seek sanctuary in subjectivity. And there they live on, in the consciousness of individuals and communities. The forward thrust of exuberance, like closure, risks leaving behind an essential past.

We were right for each other once. Whether we always will be, that's anyone's guess.

The stranger thought it might be God himself had forgotten much from our pasts, events far distant, events of the same day. And if a thing is not in God's mind, then what chance of it remaining in those of mortal men?

Looking back now, it's funny to think we got so worked up, because usually the Sales were a big disappointment....But the point was, I suppose, we'd all of us in the past found something at a Sale, something that had become special...and so however much we tried to pretend otherwise, we couldn't ever shake off the old feelings of hope and excitement.

The earlier years - the ones I've just been telling you about - they tend to blur into each other as a kind of golden time, and when I think about them at all, even the not-so-great things, I can't help feeling a sort of glow.

I could put down a scene from two days ago right beside one from twenty years earlier, and ask the reader to ponder the relationship between the two. Often the narrator himself would not need to know fully the deeper reasons for a particular juxtaposition. I could see a way of writing that could properly suggest the many layers of self-deception and denial that shrouded any person's view of their own self and past.

It's just a bit of nostalgia to pass the time.

A past may chase you if you try to escape from it... but once you confront it, it's just an old memory inside you. There's nothing to be afraid of.

My past was a private obstacle, not a public excuse.

I held you, or I never held you, or I held you briefly, once, long ago, and you kissed me while my heart kept time. — Kelly Cherry, from "First Marriage," When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women (Autumn House Press, 2008)

the book gave Jack a feeling he had never had before, that the past was like a story, in which one thing led to another, and the world was not a boundless mystery, but a finite thing that could be comprehended.

Los buenos tiempos se van para no volver nunca más.

Aquella llegada a Glastonbury era como visitar la tumba de su juventud.

Coming to Glastonbury was like visiting the grave of his youth.

B?rbatul nu avea nici trecut, nici educaÈ›ie, nici familie, dar era inteligent È™i avea bani, iar în vremuri grele, chestiile astea valorau mai mult decât o educaÈ›ie bun?.

But like always when I try to place my thoughts in the past and hide there, the fear close at hand seeps in through the memory.

and as this need grows more intense so does a sensation of movement, speed to come, impending declaration—"The past is funny, Viv; it never seems to let things lie, finished. It never seems to stay in place as it should"—until she feels that she is beginning to run down an ever steepening hill and she must stop before the hill gets too steep and she gets going too fast to stop:

uboga siedziba mej zmarnowanej mlodosci.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, good liberals both, pursued power by offering their candidacies as opportunities for Americans to document their innocence of the nation's past.

Most power is lost in one's own mind by thinking negative thoughts, by worrying about the future, by focusing on the past, as opposed to thinking positive, strong, and happy thoughts.

The Germans are indeed the economically and politically strongest power in Europe. But their superiority does not equal the past and present superiority of the Americans.

Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We're trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.

You read so much about the healing power of memoir, but you don't read about the wounding power it has first. The recollection of past events is not, in and of itself, therapeutic.

Books have given me a magic portal to connect with people of the past and the present. I know I shall never feel lonely or powerless again.