Digging The Past Quotes & Sayings

It is crucial in a sound investment process to search a mile wide than a mile deep with they find something - also.. never stop digging for information. — Seth Klarman

There is a time for hello and a time for good-bye. It's why the act of burying thing seems natural, but the act of digging them up does not. — Mitch Albom

Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. — Walter Benjamin

I may be biased, but I think jackals are cute and cuddly, even if they were known for digging up graves in Ancient Egypt. — Rick Riordan

There are many expressions to describe someone who is going about something in the wrong way. "Making a mistake" is one way to describe this situation. "Screwing up" is another, although it is a bit rude, and "Attempting to rescue Lemony Snicket by writing letters to a congressman, instead of digging an escape tunnel" is a third way, although it is a bit too specific. — Lemony Snicket

His gaze swept over her, hot and approving, as he lifted her up. "Wrap your legs around me - There. God, yeah, like that - " His voice was a low command, caressing her as much as his hands. "Hold on to me." Then his mouth crushed her own as he pushed her back against the door.
She threaded her hands into his hair as he thrust deep inside of her. He made a rough sound of sheer male pleasure, his fingers digging into her soft flesh as she rocked into him. Again he thrust, slowly at first, teasing until she was begging. It was glorious torment, hot and demanding, just like the man kissing her. — Jill Shalvis

Words, I think, are such unpredictable creatures.
No gun, no sword, no army or king will ever be more powerful than a sentence. Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future, all the time digging and failing to rip their skeletons from our flesh. — Tahereh Mafi

I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples. — John Updike

People spend thousands in therapy digging and digging in the past. When you dig and dig, you find relics. Try to forgive yourself and get back on that ride. — Richard Simmons

Keep digging, Flynn. Six feet makes a grave. — Devon Monk

A young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave. — Henri Matisse

Anyway, said Robert, they got a big fright. After that they started dropping pellets in the water and digging latrines and spraying for flies and bringing buckets of soap. But do you think they do it because they love us? Not a hope. They prefer it that we live because we look too terrible when we get sick and die. If we grew thin and turned into paper and then into ash and floated away, they wouldn't give a stuff for us. They just don't want to get upset. They want to go to sleep feeling good. — J.M. Coetzee

He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging ... He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand -like precious fragments or torsos in a collector's gallery -in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding. — Walter Benjamin

You are always digging in the past or poking at the future, but rarely do you rest in this moment. — Elizabeth Gilbert

When a poet digs himself into a hole, he doesn't climb out. He digs deeper, enjoys the scenery, and comes out the other side enlightened. — Criss Jami

Digg will serve as a means of gathering metrics for third party websites, providing them insights into who's digging their content, who they are spreading it to. — Kevin Rose

She found it hard to believe that there would be any bold moves, because too many people had dirty flour in their bags, and people with filthy fingers are hardly enthusiastic about digging up the past. — Sofi Oksanen

Sometimes, in a tight game with runners on, digging in at short, ready to break with the ball, a peace I'd never felt before would paralyze the diamond. For a moment of eternal stillness I felt as if I were cocked at the very heart of the Midwest. — Stuart Dybek

Men can dig wells, but they can't create water. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

When it was all done, Suzanna found her voice, thanking both the grave diggers and their mothers. "After all that digging," said the eldest of the girls, "I just hope he grows." "He will," said her mother, with no trace of indulgence. "They always do." On — Clive Barker

I love tearing things out of the ground. I love digging and discarding. I love pruning. In fact, I love pruning so much that I once gave myself carpal-tunnel syndrome because I attacked a trumpet vine with so much dedication. — Susan Orlean

Healey's First Law Of Holes: When in one, stop digging. — Denis Healey

At first it was, as I have said, rather bracing and tonic. For after the dream there is not reason why you should not go back and face the fact which you have fled from (even if the fact seems to be that you have, by digging up the truth about the past, handed over Anne Stanton to Willie Stark), for any place to which you may flee will not be like the place from which you have fled, and you might as well go back, after all, to the place where you belong, for nothing was your fault or anybody's fault, for things are always as they are. And you can go back in good spirits, for you will have learned two very great truths. First, that you cannot lose what you have never had. Second, that you are never guilty of a crime which you did not commit. So there is innocence and a new start in the West after all.
If you believe that dream you dream when you go there. — Robert Penn Warren

I know how much embarrassment hurts, and I love it as a theme because you can keep digging a hole. It's just an endless well, embarrassment. — Ricky Gervais

The council meeting was soon over, and Manon paused as she walked past Vernon on her way out. She put a hand on his shoulder, her nails digging into his skin, and he yelped as she brought her iron teeth close to his ear. "Just because she is dead, Lord, do not think I will forget what you tried to do to her."
Vernon paled. "You can't touch me."
Manon dug her nails in deeper. "No, I can't," she purred into his ear. "But Aelin Galathynius is alive. And I hear that she has a score to settle." She yanked out her nails and squeezed his shoulder, setting the blood running down Vernon's green tonic before she stalked from the room. — Sarah J. Maas

Archetypes resemble the beds of rivers: dried up because the water has deserted them, though it may return at any time. An archetype is something like an old watercourse along which the water of life flowed for a time, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it flowed the deeper the channel, and the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return. — Carl Jung

The value of jazz still has to be clarified. People involve themselves with its superficialities without digging for its soul. — Stan Getz

... those were the subjects that Barber dealt with as a historian, and no matter how scrupulous and profession he was in treating them, there was always a personal motive behind his work, a secret conviction that he was somehow digging into the mysteries of his own life. — Paul Auster

Now, half an hour later, adrenaline thrust him into overdrive. Storms of shale and spall burst from the ground. Ropes of sweat braided his skin. He swung again and again. The heavy pick shattered earth. Digby was in a rhythm, a digging trance, that rare state of archaeological — Shaun Morey

Digging back through the events of the past, I found that there have been all sorts of people who had a greater effect on us than our own fathers. Perhaps an adult that we wanted to become like, or someone with such a strong presence that even now, they remain in our hearts - someone who might be referred to as a "father of choice." — Mamoru Hosoda

Good fiction is trawling back into the past and digging up the real characters who've influenced your entire being. — Ken Scott

She clutched him, her fingers digging in like she needed to gather parts of him to act as her own second skin for the rest of her life. — Melina Marchetta

For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of men, yet one the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow, and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house. I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer master, but an animal among animals; under the Martian heel. — H.G.Wells

Art invites us to become explorers and excavators of our vast internal landscapes, discovering new terrain and digging deep into the past to unearth forgotten experiences and emotion. — Jaeda DeWalt

First, you must be certain that you are ready for knowledge. There are many things that we bury in our minds for a reason. Are you sure that you want to go digging up the past?"- Elsie (Marked Book #1) page 226 — A.N. Meade

The mind was a capricious and undisciplined creature. You couldn't always keep it on a lead, and it was for ever dashing off into the undergrowth of the past, digging up some decayed bone of memory, and bringing it back, with tail wagging, to lay it at your feet. — David Lodge

I have tried to use memory and invention together, like two hands engaged in the same muddy work of digging up the past. — Emma Donoghue

Someone once told me that digging up the past has two sides: The pro is that you remember things you had forgotten about. Unfortunately, the con is the exact same thing. That may scare some people away, might force them to always be moving forward, never looking back, not for a second. — Pete Wentz

I am not sure that digging in our past guilts is a useful occupation for the very old, given that one can do so little about them. I have reached a stage at which one hopes to be forgiven for concentrating on how to get through the present. — Diana Athill

Tell me, Channon," he said suddenly, "do you like teaching?"

"Some days. But it's the research I like best. I love digging through old manuscripst and trying to piece together the past."

He gave a short, half laugh. "No offense, but that sound incredibly boring."

"I imagine dragon slaying is much more action-oriented."

"Yes, it is. Every moment is completely unpredictable. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Thinking about the past is like digging up graves — Nathan Filer

There was far too much interest in the past, she thought. People were forever digging up events that had taken place a long time ago. And what was the point in doing this if the effect was merely to poison the present? — Alexander McCall Smith

We could imagine nothing pleasanter than to spend all of our lives digging for relics of the past. — Heinrich Schliemann

For after the dream there is no reason why you should not go back and face the fact which you have fled from (even if the fact seems to be that you have, by digging up the truth about the past, handed over Anne Stanton to Willie Talos), for any place to which you may flee will now be like the place from which you have fled, and you might as well go back, after all, to the place where you belong, for nothing was your fault or anybody's fault, for things are always as they are. And you can go back in good spirits, for you will have learned two very great truths. First, that you cannot lose what you have never had. Second, that you are never guilty of a crime which you did not commit. So there is innocence and a new start in the West, after all.
If you believe the dream you dream when you go there. — Robert Penn Warren

You get everything you need?"
She squealed like an idiot and whirled around to see him smirking at her. "JeSUS!" She glared at him and brushed past him, ignoring the sparks that shot down her arm where their bodies met.
Thumping down on to the sofa, she grabbed at the food tray and began digging in, glaring at him the whole time as he took the seat opposite her. She swallowed when he refused to look away. "You know this is all just a little too Virginia Andrews for my liking."
He raised an eyebrow. "Meaning?"
"The clothes, the accessories, the shampoo!" Avery shook her head in disbelief. "It's creepy, Brennus. — Samantha Young

The book begins and ends with the visits to give the impression of a tunnel into their ancestors and family history. I believe in going backwards into the past - I felt I was digging a tunnel back to the past. — Anita Desai

People were forever digging up events that had taken place a long time ago. And what was the point in doing this if the effect was merely to poison the present? There were many wrongs in the past, but did it help to keep bringing them up and giving them a fresh airing? — Alexander McCall Smith

A songwriter's heart is pure when they have the desire to keep digging deeper into music. And invariably, when you dig deeper it always leads you into the past. — Jack White

You can't dig a different hole by digging the same one deeper. — Edward De Bono

When you're thirsty, it's too late to think about digging a well. — Harvey MacKay

On the whole, mental archaeology was a sordid digging proposition. The evil men did endured, the good was infinitely more ephemeral. You could generally find out whether a man had been a horse-thief, or an embezzler or a wife-beater, if you worked hard enough, but acts of kindness, of charity, a gay spirit, vanished without leaving a trace. — Helen Kieran Reilly

So long as we continued to attach more importance to our own narrow group membership than to the 'global village' we would propagate prejudice and ignorance. There was absolutely no harm in being part of a small group - indeed, with our hunter-gatherer band mentality it gave comfort, provided us with an inner circle of friends who could be utterly trusted, who were absolutely reliable. It helped give us peace of mind. The danger came only from drawing that sharp line, digging that ditch, laying that minefield, between our own group and any other group that thought differently. — Jane Goodall

The Major sits on a log, whittling at an oak branch. I can't tell what he's making, but he goes at it with the same fervor that Nugget and Coney get digging a hole, forgetting the world around them. He's a man with busy hands, that's for sure. He's always carving, hammering, or sewing something. I've seen him create tables and benches, shoes, halters, and even a leather tie necklace for Olive, which he made by boring a hole into a bit of quartz and working the leather strap through. Afterward, he declared himself the finest jeweler in all of Glory, California. — Rae Carson

The point of the resurrection ... is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die ... What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it ... What you do in the present - by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself - will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it ... ). They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom. — N. T. Wright

When you consider the sheer magnitude of investable equities to choose from in the world's emerging markets, you realize that finding one that looks attractive enough to warrant investing your faith and assets in is as formidable a task as finding a needle in a haystack. Fortunately, researching investment opportunities is a lot more interesting than digging for needles in haystacks. — Mark Mobius

They growled a response and went on digging. For some time there was no noise but the grating sound of the spades discharging their freight of mould and gravel. It was very monotonous. Finally a spade struck upon the coffin with a dull woody accent, and within another minute or two the men had hoisted it out on the ground. They pried off the lid with their shovels, got out the body and dumped it rudely on the ground. The moon drifted from behind the clouds and exposed the pallid face. The barrow was got ready and the corpse placed on it, covered with a blanket, and bound to its place with the rope. Potter took out a large spring-knife and cut off the dangling end of the rope and then said: "Now the cussed thing's ready, Sawbones, and you'll just out with another five, or here she stays. — Mark Twain

You should never pick up a newspaper when you're feeling good, because every newspaper has a special department, called the Bummer Desk, which is responsible for digging up depressing front-page stories. — Dave Barry

Hand me a shovel, he thought. I'm getting tired of digging this hole for myself with my bare hands. -Ben — Nora Roberts

If you listen to everybody's opinions, I mean, I always say I'd be digging a ditch on the side of the road now if I had listened to what everybody told me what to do. You know, you have to follow your heart, you have to. — Brian Setzer

It was while teaching philosophy that I saw how easily one can say ... what one wants to say ... In fact, I became particularly aware if the dangers of speculation ... It's so much easier than digging out the facts. You sit in your office and build a system. But with my training in biology, I felt this kind of undertaking precarious. — Jean Piaget

Only my penis is still free and happy, no good for sword fights and no good for any work, or even for hanging things on, or for digging trenches. Praise be to God that it is so. — Yehuda Amichai

When death stood round the corner, taking lives like a gardener digging up potatoes, it was foolishness to care what dirty things this person or that did with his body. — W. Somerset Maugham

To-day I think
Only with scents, - scents dead leaves yield,
And bracken, and wild carrot's seed,
And the square mustard field;
Odours that rise
When the spade wounds the root of tree,
Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed,
Rhubarb or celery;
The smoke's smell, too,
Flowing from where a bonfire burns
The dead, the waste, the dangerous,
And all to sweetness turns.
It is enough
To smell, to crumble the dark earth,
While the robin sings over again
Sad songs of Autumn mirth.
- A poem called DIGGING. — Edward Thomas

Acting in the movies is just like ditch-digging — Margaret Sullavan

For all of my life, I am digging deep in my heart to find the liquid gold of love to share. — Debasish Mridha

The business of funding digging journalists is important to encourage. It cannot be replaced by bloggers who don't have access to politicians, who don't have easy access to official documents, who aren't able to buttonhole people in power. — Andrew Marr

My mother was always trying to think up plans for what she would do if the Taliban came. She thought of sleeping with a knife under her pillow. I said I could sneak into the toilet and call the police. My brothers and I thought of digging a tunnel. Once again I prayed for a magic wand to make the Taliban disappear. — Malala Yousafzai

I gasp, and his mouth swoops down. He's kissing me, violently. Briefly our teeth clash, then his tongue is in my mouth.
Desire explodes like the Fourth of July throughout my body, and I'm kissing him back, matching his fervor, my hands knotting in his hair, pulling it, hard. He groans, a low sexy sound in the back of his throat that reverberates through me, and his hand moves down my body to the top of my thigh, his fingers digging into my flesh through the plum dress.
I pour all the angst and heartbreak of the last few days into our kiss, binding him to me, and it hits me - in this moment of blinding passion - he's doing the same, he feels the same. — E.L. James

I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town. — T.C. Boyle

I thought you said something about a wolf' I began.
'Yes. That black beast that gnaws at my bones whenever he gets a chance. He loiters in corners and behind doors most of the time, because he's afraid of these.' She indicated the white pills on the table beside her. 'But they don't last forever. It's nearly twelve and they are wearing off. He is sniffing at my neck. By half past he will be digging his teeth and claws in. Until one, when I can take another tablet and he will have to return to his corner. We are always clockwatching, he and I. He pounces five minutes earlier every day. But I cannot take my tablets five minutes early. That stays the same. — Diane Setterfield

You need an incredible amount of self-confidence to go digging around in someone's brain. — Ben Carson

One thing they don't tell you 'bout the blues when you got 'em, you keep on fallin' 'cause there ain't no bottom,' sings Emmylou Harris, and she may be right. Perhaps it would help to be told that there is no bottom, save, as they say, wherever and whenever you stop digging. You have to stand there, spade in hand, cold whiskey sweat beaded on your brow, eyes misshapen and wild, some sorry-ass grave digger grown bone-tired of the trade. You have to stand there in the dirty rut you dug, alone in the darkness, in all its pulsing quiet, surrounded by the scandal of corpses. — Maggie Nelson

Each year, every city in the world that can should have a multiday festival. More people meeting each other, digging new types of music, new foods, new ideas. You want to stop having so many wars? This could be a step in the right direction. — Henry Rollins

Like most guys, I had bought into the stereotype that all feminists were white, lesbian, unattractive male bashers who hated all men. But after reading the work of these black feminists, I realized that this was far from the truth. After digging into their work, I came to really respect the intelligence, courage and honesty of these women.
Feminists did not hate men. In fact, they loved men. But just as my father had silenced my mother during their arguments to avoid hearing her gripes, men silenced feminists by belittling them in order to dodge hearing the truth about who we are. — Byron Hurt

He who thinks he is raising a mound may only in reality be digging a pit. — Ernest Bramah

data mining is the act of digging into large amounts of raw data to discover unique nontrivial useful patterns. — Anil Maheshwari

You are following Jesus and shaping our world in the power of the Spirit. And when the final consummation comes, the work that you have done - whether in Bible study or biochemistry, whether in preaching or in pure mathematics, whether in digging ditches or in composing symphonies - will stand, will last.

The fact that we live between, so to speak, the beginning of the End and the end of the End, should enable us to come to terms with our vocation to be for the world that Jesus was for Israel, and in the power of the Spirit to forgive and retain sins. — N. T. Wright

My work is like digging, it's archaeological research among the arid materials of our times. That's how I understand my first films, and that's what I'm still doing ... — Michelangelo Antonioni

Long before Eichmann's capture, Auerbach had conducted research on Operation 1005, the large-scale secret campaign to destroy evidence of the Final Solution by digging up the mass graves, pulverizing the bodies in specially adapted cement-mixer apparatuses, and erasing all traces of the atrocities. She also found two people who had participated as slave laborers in this effort.

-- The Eichmann Trial, page 53 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

There's great value to knitting or digging up your garden or chopping up vegetables for soup, because you're taking some time away from turning the pages, answering your emails, talking to people on the phone, and you're letting your brain process whatever is stuck up in there. — Chellie Pingree

Thud, thud, thud, riderless black horse with red eyes coming down the halls of his mind, ironshod hooves digging up soft gray clods of brain tissue, leaving hoofprints to fill up with mystic crescents of blood. — Stephen King

By analyzing data from Greenwich Observatory in the period 1836-1953, John A. Eddy [Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and High Altitude Observatory in Boulder] and Aram A. Boornazian [mathematician with S. Ross and Co. in Boston] have found evidence that the sun has been contracting about 0.1% per century during that time, corresponding to a shrinkage rate of about 5 feet per hour. And digging deep into historical records, Eddy has found 400-year-old eclipse observations that are consistent with such a shrinkage. — Jonathan Sarfati