Quotes & Sayings About Leaving Behind The Past

A country cannot make progress while leaving half of its population behind. — Melanne Verveer

He looked at the mud. "If I pull you free, will you promise to bed me for my pains?"

"Here's what I'll promise, Logan MacKenzie. If you don't get me free, I will come back from the grave and haunt you. Relentlessly."

"For a timid English bluestocking, you can be quite fierce when you choose to be. I rather like it."

She hugged herself to keep her hands out of the creeping mud. "Logan, please. I be you, stop teasing and get me out of this. I'm cold. And I'm frightened."

"Look at me."
She looked at him.
His gaze held hers, blue and unwavering.

All teasing went out his voice. "I'm not leaving. Ten years in the British Army, and I've never left a man behind. I'm not leaving you. I'll have you out of this. Understand? — Tessa Dare

I've got a feeling I'm leaving stardom behind, you know. I'm gradually becoming more of a filmmaker, acquiring a different kind of dignity from that which you achieve in acting. After all, I'm no matinee idol, and I'm getting older. I don't think I can be doing my kind of thing in the seventies; I want to be on more of the creative side of business. — Steve McQueen

He shook his head in disbelief. He would cook and take her to his place. He was about to break two of his own rules. Number one was to never create the intimacy of cooking for a woman he was seeing, and the other one, to never take her to his place. They had the nasty habit of leaving personal things behind and making his house an extension of their own. He had no other alternative - she shared her place with her brother - but somehow he was enjoying doing it for Mary.
Perfect Match — Marcia Weber Martins

Leaving behind books is even more beautiful - there are far too many children. — Marguerite Yourcenar

I see artists bored by light-without-heat, irked at gigantic galleries' pushing out art-as-product, leaving behind the over determined for the undetermined, guided by interior voices and bringing us out of a long tunnel to new blueness. — Jerry Saltz

All he cares about here on the edge of forever, is her. He does not want to die. Not because he is afraid. Simply because he cannot bear the thought of leaving her behind. — Amie Kaufman

If you kept moving, you never had to mourn what you were leaving behind. — Lisa Alther

It would be the simplest thing to say, my homeland is where I was born. But when you returned, you found nothing. What does that mean? It would be the simplest thing to say, my homeland is where I will die. But you could die anywhere, or on the border between two places. What does that mean? After a while the question will become harder. Why did you leave? Why did you leave? For twenty years you have been asking, why did they leave? Leaving is not a negation of the homeland, but it does turn the problem into a question. Do not write a history now. When you do that, you leave the past behind, and what is required is to call the past to account. Do not write a history except that of your wounds. Do not write a history except that of your exile. You are here - here, where you were born. And where longing will lead you to death. So, what is homeland? — Mahmoud Darwish

Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving behind them piles of small slim volumes of literary criticism. — Terry Pratchett

Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them. — Cormac McCarthy

If you're leaving your family behind, you better believe in what you're singing. — Jon Foreman

Hopes were high. But just like a balloon pushed past its breaking point, hope is fragile. One lungful of air too many and the balloon bursts leaving ugly, shriveled fragments behind, impossible to piece back together. — Adriane Leigh

The light was leaving in the west it was blue The children's laughter sang and skipping just like the stones they threw the voices echoed across the way its getting late It was just another night with the sun set and the moon rise not so far behind to give us just enough light to lay down underneath the stars listen to papas translations of the stories across the sky we drew our own constellations — Jack Johnson

Let go of the past. Let go of the future. Let go of the present. Proceed to the opposite shore with a free mind, leaving behind all conditioned things. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Don't believe I've had the pleasure," she began. "Are you mad? I had you last year at Lord Addington's spring formal! We went behind his pagoda and I took you from the rear. You said I was the best you'd ever had!" The color drained from her face - clearly she didn't find my scenario entirely implausible. Stammering an explanation she hurried off, leaving me to watch the celebration solo. — Daniel Polansky

I am not surprised of your goodbye, breaking heart and leaving behind; maybe these are what angels do for fun. — M.F. Moonzajer

One of my favorite feelings is the sense I get from pouring over parts of my past before lighting them up and leaving it all behind me to start over again. — Madi Diaz

To move foward, you have to leave the past behind — Susannah Cahalan

I stand still for a long time, holding the note, and let it all sink in. Her leaving is almost palpable like a gale-force wind that's rolled into my life in the span of a single evening and left behind all this incalculable destruction, both inside and out. Yes, the tempest has passed, but the air around me feels different. I can hardly breathe. Nothing is the same without her. As the lone survivor of her particular storm, I begin to wonder just exactly what I'm supposed to do now. — Katherine Owen

Leaving things behind and starting again is a way of coping with difficulties. I learnt very early in my life that I was able to leave a place and still remain myself. — Rachel Cusk

The past is but an untraceable footfall
It appears in intervals and pushes us back in time,
In those moments of grief and then suddenly vanishes.
It's often dark and ruthless.
It baffles our thoughts and seizes our peace of mind.
By making us recollect our failures, our buried expectations
And our shattered dreams
It only gives way to fleeting tears, leaving us with fruitless guilt.
It wrecks our present and ruins our future
And thus should be left where it is meant to be
It should be left behind ... — Chirag Tulsiani

As he plods behind Cameron and Summer, he can't help but stare at Summer's exposed, glistening skin. His thoughts aren't depraved or even mildly in the splasher. In fact, he focuses on the marks of cruelty crisscrossing her back, stomach, and shoulders. He trudges along, drenched, feet swollen, constantly searching for even a hint of a breeze, all while being forced to stare at the alarming network of burns traversing Summer's delicate skin. This latticework of hate reveals a brutal truth - one he can scarcely comprehend. Yes, he's glimpsed and felt her scars before, but this is the first time he's really, truly seen the severity and extent of her life as a slave. With each step, he must digest the monstrosities of her past, leaving him utterly devastated. — Laura Kreitzer

I stood on the old ferry dock and watched the icy sludge slide by. Patches of white ice slipped through, but mostly it was grey slush, sluggish and heavy looking. The air was sharp and clear, one of the few benefits of the evacuation and reducing temperature, the centuries-old odour of industry and modern life frozen and discarded, leaving a crispness previously only found among the peaks of mountain ranges. On the far bank stood the ruins of Birkenhead, where the riots had been particularly bad and the fires that followed were allowed to rage out of control. It had taken weeks for the conflagration to finally die, leaving behind soot-blackened husks of buildings, grotesque sculptures of melted glass and metal and more dead than anyone ever cared to count. — Neil Davies

Mama and I walked back out of the woods just in time to hear Frannie squeal, "I want to stay here forever!" "Fine by me." Cleo smiled. She opened up her little red cooler and sloshed through the ice. She pulled out an orange soda bottle and passed it to my sister. "We can stay here all day, at least." "Cleo Harness?" yelled a familiar, husky voice from the edge of the woods. "Is that you?" "Pack up!" Cleo hollered. "We're leaving!" She kicked the cooler lid shut and stood up so fast that her camping chair stayed stuck to her behind. — Natalie Lloyd

Life a series of paths. To helping people. To hurting people. To leaving certain places and certain people behind. For better or worse. — Aaron Starmer

Taking Morgana with it, the lightning arced back through the clouds; leaving behind nothing but the last echoing remains of her scream. — Sam Whitehouse

Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still. — C.S. Lewis

Know this ... she does not want to become the shadow of her husband, but the moon of his life, for when she appears, her presence is powerful in all her mysterious ways ... she comes and goes so discreetly, waning and waxing whilst forever leaving her presence behind, reminding you that you cannot survive life without her ... — Jemina Akhtar

No stress, no fights. I'm leaving it all behind. No tears, no time to cry. Just making the most of life. — Mariah Carey

I could not imagine that the future I was walking toward could compare in any way to the past that I was leaving behind. — Nelson Mandela

You gotta keep things moving. If leaving behind the past means you can have a better future, then, sure, why not? — Lisa Mangum

All my life I have been trained by that siren. Before I could walk I knew the siren meant death. It meant somehow the fences had been breached and the Unconsecrated were shuffling among us. It meant grab weapons, move to the platforms and pull up the ladders - even if it necessitated leaving the living behind.
Growing up, my mother used to tell me about how in the beginning, when her own great-great-great-grandmother was a child, that siren would wail almost constantly as the village was bombarded with the Unconsecrated. But then the fences has been fortified, the Guardians had formed and time had passed with the Unconsecrated dwindling to the point that I couldn't remember a time in the past few years when that siren had wailed and it had not been a drill. I know that in my life there have been breaches but I also know that I am very good at blocking out the memories that serve me no purpose. I can fear the Unconsecrated well enough without them. — Carrie Ryan

Not watching the path where his legs took him, he walked on because he knew he had to walk ahead, leaving his past behind. — Faraaz Kazi

She felt a cage coming down around her; too late she realized that he had her trapped by the heart. And like any unwilling animal that was well and truly caught, she could escape only by leaving a piece of herself behind. — Jodi Picoult

Shadows go in front of you, leading into your future, and trail behind you, leaving a part of you in the past. They are clearest when we are in the light, and disappear when we lose ourselves in darkness. — Kiersten White

we have a Gene-IE to grant us wishes," he said. Darlene brushed past in her white coat. To my surprise, Eliza was at the computer desk behind the lab door and looked up at me. "You took your time," she said with a glint in her green eyes. "Leaving us to do all the work." I had an overwhelming urge to hug her, which I didn't fight. She responded very tightly, then slowly broke away. "What are you doing standing — James Patterson

I wanted to start over completely, to begin again as new people with nothing of the past left over. I wanted to run away from who we had been seen to be, who we had been ... It's the first thing I think of when trouble comes - the geographic solution. Change your name, leave town, disappear, make yourself over. What hides behind that impulse is the conviction that the life you have lived, the person you are, is valueless, better off abandoned, that running away is easier than trying to change things, that change itself is not possible. — Dorothy Allison

The Librarian swung on. It was slow progress, because there were things he wasn't keen on meeting. Creatures evolved to fill every niche in the environment, and some of those in the dusty immensity of L-space were best avoided. They were much more unusual than ordinary unusual creatures.
Usually he could forewarn himself by keeping a careful eye on the kickstool crabs that grazed harmlessly on the dust. When they were spooked, it was time to hide. Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving behind them piles of small literary criticism. And there were other things, things which he hurried away from and tried not to look hard at ...
And you had to avoid cliches at all costs. — Terry Pratchett

The truth is not so important as the leaving of it behind. — Clare Francis

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise. — Maya Angelou

From the photo albums, every single print of her had been peeled away. Shots of the both of us together had been cut, the parts with her neatly trimmed away, leaving my image behind. Photos of me alone or of mountains and rivers and deer and cats were left intact. Three albums rendered into a revised past. It was as if I'd been alone at birth, alone all my days, and would continue alone. — Haruki Murakami

Maybe you've gotten through something and when you did you thought, I am leaving that behind and will never return. And that's a great way of thinking ... for selfish jerks.
If we actually care about people other than ourselves, we can't leave our problems behind and never return. If we don't take the freedom we've experienced and try to bring it to others, we are not becoming people worth becoming. — Vince Antonucci

The Buddhist ideal of awakening implies that we can sever our links with our evolutionary past. We can raise ourselves from the sleep in which other animals pass their lives. Our illusions dissolved, we need no longer suffer. This is only another doctrine of salvation, subtler than that of the Christians, but no different from Christianity in its goal of leaving our animal inheritance behind.
But the idea that we can rid ourselves of animal illusion is the greatest illusion of all. meditation may give us a fresher view of things but cannot uncover them as they are in themselves. — John Gray

Mira moved into the light like a sleepwalker, leaving Blue behind in the dust, the unused room, the past.
She thought of the fabled hundred years that cursed girls like her had slept, and how, after that much time, everything would be covered by a thick blanket of dust, including the princess. The intrepid prince would have to trust that something beautiful was hidden underneath. He'd kiss her and the first color to be revealed would be the chapped pink of her lips.
Her eyes went to Freddie, playing his guitar and lit by the sun. She couldn't picture him kissing a girl coated by dust - he was too alive for that.
He was golden. And she ... she was covered with death, with her grief over her parents. She'd tried to replace them with dreams, and she'd drifted through life in a haze, her eyes seeking ghosts instead of the world around her.
She was already asleep.
She had been for a long time. — Sarah Cross

The silhouettes of houses slipped past before I could catch them and remember the people we were leaving behind. In a couple of hours they would wake and find us gone, far away, so as not to remind them of their pain and what our family now meant to this town.
My name is Tom Brennan and this is my story. — J.C. Burke

Something horrible had happened here, and had left it's residue behind. It seemed to rise from the bottom of the tiled pool and leak from the ceiling, clinging to the walls and binding itself like some parasite into any host it could ensnare. I imagined it's cold fingers rooting inside me, spreading throughout, and leaving traces of itself embedded in my soul. — Lani Woodland

Powerlessness does not mean the weakness of resignation or the passivity of an 'anything goes'. Powerlessness does not mean inability ,not having the capacity. Powerlessness means rather leaving power behind , something as disempowering. — Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback

It feels like a threat. It feels like the world changing and leaving you behind. — Patrick Ness

He knows I have a soft spot for RLS and not just because he was sick or because we have the same initials but because there's something impossibly romantic about him and because before he started writing Treasure Island he first drew a map of an unknown island and because he believed in invisible places and was one of the last writers to know what the word adventure means. I could give you a hundred reasons why RLS is The Man. Look in his The Art of Writing (Book 683, Chatto & Windus, London) where he says that no living people have had the influence on him as strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. Or when he says his greatest friend is D'Artagnan from The Three Musketeers (Book 5, Regent Classics, London). RLS said: 'When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge, I take them like opium.' And when you read Treasure Island you feel you are casting off. That's the thing. You are casting off and leaving behind the ordinary dullness of the world. — Niall Williams

I recognized my work for what it was
as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes, or cheap jewellry? — Graham Greene

The man who dies leaving behind him millions of available wealth, which was his to administer during his life, will pass away unwept, unhonoured and insung no matter to what uses he leaves the dross which he cannot take with him. — Andrew Carnegie

All of us need to leave things behind in order to follow God. For some of us, it is addictive patterns of behavior, for others an overweening emphasis on our own success, for others the adulation of the crowd. It helps sometimes to look not just at what we're leaving behind and what God promises us, but also at what God has shown us already. Just look at all those fish. — James Martin

So far, the thing I seem to have been rewarded for in film is leaving myself behind and transforming myself into other people. — Marcia Gay Harden

And here's the shock
when you risk it, when you do the right thing, when you arrive at the borders of common sense and cross into unknown territory, leaving behind you all the familiar smells and lights, you do not experience great joy and huge energy.
You are unhappy. Things get worse.
It is a time of mourning. Loss. Fear. We bullet ourselves through with questions. And then we feel shot and wounded.
And then all the cowards come out and say, 'See, I told you so.'
In fact, they told you nothing. — Jeanette Winterson

The city of New Orleans showed America what it takes to rebuild a great place. We're all going together, and we're not leaving anybody behind. — Mitch Landrieu

I never thought I would be left behind."
He chuckled. "Eloise Bridgerton, I don't think anyone wouldever make the mistake of leaving you
behind. — Julia Quinn

Drunk were left alone in the graveyard. The priest looked down at the drunk disdainfully, and backed through the open door, which closed behind him, leaving the drunk on his own. The clockwork story was deeply unsettling. Much more unsettling, thought Shadow, than clockwork has any right to be. You know why I show that to you? — Neil Gaiman

After the small woman had left, Ushikawa stared at the door for the longest time. She had shut the door behind her, but there was still a strong sense of her in the room. Maybe in exchange for leaving a trace of herself behind, she had taken away a part of Ushikawa's soul. He could feel that new void within his chest. Why did this happen? he wondered, finding it odd. And what could it possibly mean? — Haruki Murakami

Consumptive patients, with lungs incompetent to perform the duties of lungs, people with defective hearts that break down under excitement of the circulation, people with any constitutional flaw preventing the due fulfillment of the conditions of life are continually dying out and leaving behind those fit for the climate, food, and habits to which they are born ... And thus is the race kept free from vitiation. — Herbert Spencer

'Star Trek' is notorious for looting the more thoughtful work of writers for their striking effects, leaving behind most of the thought and subtlety. — Gregory Benford

It means leaving behind your physical body. Leaving the cage of your physical flesh, breaking free of the chains, and letting pure logic soar. Giving a natural life to logic. That's the core of free thought. — Haruki Murakami

I'm not moping," I whisper back. "Of course you're not. A girl like you, spending time with a warrior demigod like me. What's to mope about? Leaving a wheelchair behind couldn't possibly show up on the radar compared to that."
"You've got to be kidding me."
"I never kid about my warrior demigod status. — Susan Ee

Secrets...were cancers. Secrets festered. Secrets ate away at your innards, leaving behind nothing but a flimsy husk. — Harlan Coben

To be an effective organisation, the structure of the organisation must be willing to adapt to a network model, leaving the old hierarchy model behind. We see the efficacy of the network model daily in many areas of our lives, and this greatly challenges the old from-top-to-down hierarchical model that many organisations have a hard time letting go of. But I suppose at the end of the day, it is a matter of survival. Simply put, in order to survive, one must adapt and to adapt today, means to take on a more networked approach to doing things in organisations, groups, companies and even in society as a whole (including politics). So in other words, in order for society in all of its forms from big to small, to move forward strongly, it must adapt to a framework that sees itself as a network rather than a hierarchy. — C. JoyBell C.

The bones said death was comin', and the bones never lied.
Eva Savoie leaned back in the rocking chair and pushed it into motion on the uneven wide-plank floor of the one-room cabin. Her grand pere Julien had built the place more than a century ago, pulling heavy cypress logs from the bayou and sawing them, one by one, into the thick planks she still walked across ever day.
She had never known Julien Savoie, but she knew of him. The curse that had stalked her family for three generations had started with her grandfather and what he'd done all those years ago.
What he'd brought with him to Whiskey Bayou with blood on his hands.
What had driven her daddy to shoot her mama, and then himself, before either turned forty-five.
What had led Eva's brother, Antoine, to drown in the bayou only a half mile from this cabin, leaving a wife and infant son behind.
What stalked Eva now. — Susannah Sandlin

Pundits, opponents, and disillusioned supporters would blame Obama for squandering the promise of his administration. Certainly he and his administration made their share of mistakes. But it is hard to think of another president who had to face the kind of guerrilla warfare waged against him almost as soon as he took office. A small number of people with massive resources orchestrated, manipulated, and exploited the economic unrest for their own purposes. They used tax-deductible donations to fund a movement to slash taxes on the rich and cut regulations on their own businesses. While they paid focus groups and seasoned operatives to frame these self-serving policies as matters of dire public interest, they hid their roles behind laws meant to protect the anonymity of philanthropists, leaving more folksy figures like Santelli to carry the message. — Jane Mayer

Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved. — Jorge Luis Borges

The first New Year after they died felt like another betrayal--we were leaving behind the last year in which they had lived, a year they had known, and starting on a year that they would never experience. — Lydia Davis

Look at the children of the land leaving in droves, leaving their own land with bleeding wounds on their bodies and shock on their faces and blood in their hearts and hunger in their stomachs and grief in their footsteps. Leaving their mothers and fathers and children behind, leaving their umbilical cords underneath the soil, leaving the bones of their ancestors in the earth, leaving everything that makes them who and what they are, leaving because it is no longer possible to stay. They will never be the same again because you cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same. — NoViolet Bulawayo

And then last autumn his heart had stopped working properly. The veterinarian said that they just had to care for him and love him, and Batty had loved him, and loved him, and loved him, but it hadn't been enough. No one in her family had ever said that Hound's dying was her fault, but she knew the truth. She hadn't been able to keep him with her, to stop him from leaving her behind. — Jeanne Birdsall

That's what happens when stars stop fusing hydrogen into helium. They lose their helium, become too heavy, and then fall through the spacetime fabric, leaving the black hole behind them. — Diana Rose

The justification I hear more often than any other for leaving the Bible behind is that "everyone knows" it is antiquated and full of scientific nonsense, if not blatant errors and contradictions. Amazingly, when I ask people to cite examples, many cannot bring to mind even one. Apparently, they base their opinion on hearsay and repeat a widespread misconception. Among those who do answer my question, one Bible portion draws more vigorous attack than all others combined: the first few chapters of Genesis. This attack opens a wonderful door of opportunity for me - and for every believer who knows something about the scientific discoveries of the past few decades. Instead of offering an excuse for disbelief and rejection, these chapters present some of the most persuasive evidences ever assembled for the supernatural authorship, accuracy, and authority of the Bible. — Hugh Ross

When we talk of leaving our childhood behind us, we might as well say that the river flowing onward to the sea had left the fountain behind. — Anna Brownell Jameson

Hatred ... When it comes to men and sex, David, nothing surprises me any more. Maybe, for men, hating the woman makes sex more exciting. You are a man, you ought to know. When you have sex with someone strange - when you trap her, hold her down, get her under you, put all your weight on her - isn't it a killing? Pushing the knife in; exiting afterwards, leaving the body behind covered in blood - doesn't it feel like murder, like getting away with murder? — J.M. Coetzee

We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move. — Jack Kerouac

There. You see? You're just figuring it out now, but I discovered a long time ago that the smarter you are, the more tempting it is to just let people imagine you. We move through each other's lives like ghosts, leaving behind haunting memories of people who never existed. The popular jock. The mysterious new girl. But we're the ones who choose, in the end, how people see us. And I'd rather be misremembered. Please, Ezra, misremember me. — Robyn Schneider

No individual has any right to come into the world and go out of it without leaving behind him distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through it. — George Washington Carver

And our marriage dissolved, like margarita salt on the tongue, leaving behind the bitter aftertaste of something that started out sweet but ended sour. — Tracy Brogan

Now and then, living more with less means paying more money. It may mean buying better quality - leaving behind repetitive purchases of discount junk for one expensive, well-made, thoughtfully designed tool that will last. — Doris Janzen Longacre