Quotes About Past

I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and how if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future.

But, the stultifying lingo aside, the question I raise is a vital one for us all, we are all stuck with trying to find the meaning of our lives, and the only thing we have to work on, or with, is our past.

What sort of future is coming up from behind I don't really know. But the past, spread out ahead, dominates everything in sight.

Her view of the future was hindered because her view of the future did not include enough of the past.

Rebellion flamed up in her soul as the dark hours passed by – not because she had no future but because she had no past.

Oh, I wish we had the old days back again, exclaimed Jem. I'd love to be a soldier—a great, triumphant general. I'd give EVERYTHING to see a big battle. Well

She was still haunted by the ghost of the cake she had drowned.

Today, so long, so strange, so bitter; will soon be some forgotten yesterday.

El pasado es un país extranjero: allí las cosas se hacen de manera distinta.

All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream. —T. K. Whipple, Study Out the Land

He ought to let the past keep its glow and not try to mix it with what he had in the present.

was not old enough to understand the need to go back to a place where things were simple. He had no happiness in his face, the young ranger; perhaps he had never had a place where things were simple, a place he could think about when he needed to remember happiness. Perhaps the young ranger had been unlucky—he might have no good place or good time to remember.

All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.

But yesterday's gone on down the river and you can't get it back.

You can't change the past. You can't even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives.

A four-year-old has so little past, and he remembers almost none of it, neither the father he once had nor the house where he once lived. But he can feel the absences – and feel them as sensation, like a texture that was once at his fingers every day but now is gone and no matter how he gropes or reaches his hand he cannot touch what's no longer there.

What is it that keeps us in motion? Not seldom, the fear that the bitterness of the past will catch up with us. The bitterness over all missed opportunities. Bitterness at being who you are, and still not more like yourself.

It's a terrible thing to know everything about someone long after you want to.

Todo se olvida en esta vida, todo pasa al recuerdo, todo acontecimiento deja de ser presente, pierde su valor y su significado.

They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

the old Virginia shore. So carry

Like the food experts of the last century, today's enthusiasts are fully convinced they have rescued food from the barbarous prisons of the past.

Girls were always attracted to middle-aged men with interesting pasts.' The relationship is all about hero-worship on one side, youth-worship on the other

He wanted me to be free of the past so I could be open to the future. So Alan named him after the white pines at Camp Fantastic. The tall, tall trees that had watched over Asher, and Eleanor, and everyone who had ever come here. The trees that framed a small beautiful world where joy transcended grief, and where the sounds of children, once alive, now gone, can still be heard.