Quotes & Sayings About Left The Past

Learn from your past and shut the door behind to live in present.Our past is just like a dry rose which was once a rose with all colors of life, with sweet fragrance, with soft petal, with thorns but now it is left with only thorns which could still hurt. — Ideaswar

You have blotted out the past for me, you know, far more effectively than all the bright lights of Monte Carlo. But for you I should have left long ago, gone to Italy, and Greece, and further still perhaps. You have spared me all those wanderings. — Daphne Du Maurier

A man that is of Copernicus' Opinion, that this Earth of ours is a Planet, carry'd round and enlightn'd by the Sun, like the rest of them, cannot but sometimes have a fancy ... that the rest of the Planets have their Dress and Furniture, nay and their Inhabitants too as well as this Earth of ours. ... But we were always apt to conclude, that 'twas in vain to enquire after what Nature had been pleased to do there, seeing there was no likelihood of ever coming to an end of the Enquiry ... but a while ago, thinking somewhat seriously on this matter (not that I count my self quicker sighted than those great Men [of the past], but that I had the happiness to live after most of them) me thoughts the Enquiry was not so impracticable nor the way so stopt up with Difficulties, but that there was very good room left for probable Conjectures. — Christiaan Huygens

I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it. — Margaret Atwood

On the ghosts in Moorehawke & Into The Grey/Taken Away:
The ghosts ... are symbolic of those unresolved moments in history that linger, and affect the next generation. Sometimes this happens without that generation ever really knowing the truth of what has come before. This is so true of war, I think, where we are often only left the stories that the previous generation wanted us to hear ... How much harder would the truth be to deny were it lingering about as an actual manifestation of the past? — Celine Kiernan

Once an event has taken place, since you cannot alter the past, all that is left to you is your response. — Chris Prentiss

I was wrong when I said that I did not regret the past. I do regret it; I weep for the past love which can never return. Who is to blame, I do not know. Love remains, but not the old love; its place remains, but it is all wasted away and has lost all strength and substance; recollections are still left, and gratitude; but ... — Leo Tolstoy

The rain started while we sat in the kitchen, and we left the kitchen door open so we could watch the rain slanting past the doorway and washing the garden; Constance was pleased, the way any good gardener is pleased with rain. — Shirley Jackson

I believed it had been long enough that Kresimir would never return. I believed it was time for change. I thought all of Rozalia's concerns were foolish, and that Julene was living in the past. I believed we were alone."
"My people have never been alone," Mihali said. "The others may have left. I did not. — Brian McClellan

It would almost be easier to never see her again tan to look into her eyes and know she'd left her love for him somewhere in the past. — Karen Kingsbury

Perhaps because of all the money poured into this, the things behind the spanking displays look old and crummy, like articles from a time that has been left behind. I slap down the stairs in my sandals. I am annoyed that this past can look so tawdry and so safe, as if destined from the outset to end up behind glass, securely roped off and under pressure-button control. And I am annoyed at myself: what's the problem? Isn't a museum the place for things that are over? — Anna Funder

The old men from the charity hospital next door would come jerking past our rooms, making useless, disjointed leaps. They'd go from room to room, spitting out gossip between their decayed teeth, purveying scraps of malignant worn-out slander. Cloistered in their official misery as in an oozing dungeon, those aged workers ruminated the layer of shit that long years of servitude deposit on men's souls. Impotent hatreds grown rancid in the pissy idleness of dormitories. They employed their last quavering energies in hurting each other a little more. In destroying what little pleasure they had left.
Their last remaining pleasure! Their shriveled carcasses contained not one solitary atom that was not absolutely vicious! — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

There is great advantage to be gained in distantly estranging ourselves from our age and for once being driven as it were away from its shores back on to the ocean of the world-outlooks of the past. Looking back at the coast from this distance we command a view, no doubt for the first time, of its total configuration, and when we approach it again we have the advantage of understanding it better as a whole than those who have never left it. — Friedrich Nietzsche

And yes, there are things I want to keep, that I like around me - especially when there's very little left. I just want to keep those little bits of reminders of my past. There are certain drawings from the '60s; certain little paintings from the '60s that I keep. — Robert Barry

The past is never where you think you left it. — Katherine Anne Porter

I feel happy about the songs I've written. I'm a great lover of the craft of songwriting, and I sure admire it in other people when I see it - past and present. I feel comfortable with what I have accomplished. I feel happy to be able to work in that environment, and that I have a lot of songs left to be written, somewhere. — John Fogerty

Courage does not require rappelling across rocky cliffs but rather, day in and day out, overcoming our fears by stepping outside our personal comfort zone, following our intuition, and making ourselves available to the larger plan. It means we transcend our limited self-definitions to be open to new information and stretch beyond the way we've always done things in the past. It means we listen within and sometimes turn left when everyone else seems to be going right. It allows us to risk ridicule to create something new, or to risk rejection when we are being true to our sense of what's right. — Charlene Belitz

The only life I have left to live is future life. The past is not in my hands to offer or alter. It is gone. Not even God will change the past. All the expectations of God are future expectations. All the possibilities of faith and love are future possibilities. And all the power that touches me with help to live in love is future power. As precious as the bygone blessings of God may be, if He leaves me only with the memory of those, and not with the promise of more, I will be undone. My hope for future goodness and future glory is future grace. — John Piper

I see not a step before me as I tread on another year;But I've left the Past in God's keeping,-the FutureHis mercy shall clear;And what looks dark in the distance may brighten as I draw near. — Mary Gardiner Brainard

Somehow, the pain and rage and confusion of the past eighteen years dissolves until all that is left is this one perfect moment; unscripted, unedited, it's ours and ours alone. — Heather Demetrios

Last night you left me and slept your own deep sleep. Tonight you turn and turn. I say, 'You and I will be together till the Universe dissolves.' You mumble back things you thought of when you were drunk. — Rumi

Only in the present tense is the subject married to its verb. The action - all action, past and future - comes at the end. At the very end, when there is nothing left to do but act. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Our past is what shapes us, the scars it leaves behind mold us, and what we do with the shit that's left over is what defines us. — Gail McHugh

It is important to note that multiculturalism does not share the postmodernist stance. Its passions are political; its assumptionsempirical; its conception of identities visceral. For it, there is no doubting that history is something that happened and that those happenings have left their mark within our collective consciousness. History for multiculturalists is not a succession of dissolving texts, but a tense tangle of past actions that have reshaped the landscape, distributed the nation's wealth, established boundaries, engendered prejudices, and unleashed energies. — Joyce Appleby

When I go out by the gateway, taking the road I drove along that first time I picked up Lotte for the ball, how very different it all is! It is all over, all of it! There is not a hint of the world that once was, not one bulse-beat of those past emotions. I feel like a ghost returning to the burnt-out ruins of the castle he built in his prime as a prince, which he adorned with magnificent splendours and then, on his deathbed, but full of hope, left to his beloved son — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Still, I strongly resisted the idea of offering up my past in a book, a past that left me feeling exposed, even slightly ashamed. — Barack Obama

What did you learn?"
"Letting go of my past, because it's all soot, nothing is left
of it, if I wandered there for long I would be running in circles
in the dark, no hope, no life. And if I chose to live in those
places rebuilt from ashes, I can never get rid of the darkness
which would prevail underneath."
"The present is my ray of hope. I could have stayed there,
complaining about the gloominess of the light, and regretting
not having turned a corner to explore a new horizon at the same
time I needed to respect that light because it was my savior from
the dark. I learnt it finally and that's why I reached here today
and found you — Dixy Gandhi

Inside every one of us is a garden, and every practitioner has to go back to their garden and take care of it. Maybe in the past, you left in untended for a long time. You should know exactly what is going on in your own garden, and try to put everything in order. Restore the beauty; restore the harmony in your garden. If it is well tended, many people will enjoy your garden. — Nhat Hanh

In many ways marine biology is at a pivotal moment, when we are discovering the richness of the ocean at the very time we are grasping how we've managed to deplete it over the last few centuries. Preserving what's left, as well as rebuilding parts of it to a semblance of what it used to be, requires us to relinquish some of the power we have exercised in the past. It requires living with sharks. — Juliet Eilperin

My lover is dead.
And they think I killed him.
I'm running rogue.
Hell bent on both revenge and redemption. Whatever it takes, I'm going to finish a job that began nine months ago. An unauthorized assignment that turned horribly, devastatingly wrong. My miscalculation.
My fault.
My heart left shattered into incomplete pieces which will never wholly fit back together again.
But first I have to outsmart my former organization and the hired killer they've sent after me; a ghost from my past who knows my every move, who's been inside my head, my heart, my dreams and memories: Jaxson.
I'm the traitor, Kylie. The rogue mercenary, Jaxon's newest assignment. And this is our love story. — Michele Mannon

When we let go of yearning for the future, preoccupation with the past, and strategies to protect the present, there is nowhere left to go but where we are. To connect with the present moment is to begin to appreciate the beauty of true simplicity. — Jack Kornfield

Eventually, she looked up, her eyes completely void of emotions. "You are merely a diversion. You mean nothing to me."
She walked past him and out of the room. She left him, a fish gasping amongst the clouds, falling back to earth. — Michelle Frost

The story of the past generation has been that the right has won politically and the left has won culturally. — Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks, and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship's wake. — Joseph Conrad

You left me.
Not realizing until I've said my final good-bye and closed the door behind me, that he's not referring to the past.
He's prophesying our future. — Alyson Noel

My other chore is to buy a tree- a thankless task. The only truly well-proportioned Christmas trees are the ones they use in advertisements. If you try and find one in real life you face inevitable disapointment. Your tree will lean to the left or the right. It will be too bushy at the base, or straggly at the top. Even if you do, by some miracle, find a perfect tree, if won't fit in the car and by the time you strap it to the rooftop and drive it home the branches are broken and twisted out of shape. You
wrestle it through the door, gagling on pine needles and sweating profusely, only to hear the maddening question from countless Christmases past: 'Is that really the best one you could find? — Michael Robotham

The mirror it was and life it spelled,
The road ahead, and the time past stepped,
All gathered in one; one to all paired,
My life is so different from all the world's threads.

My breaths are mine, my woes are too,
If my life were put through you,
You sure would unlikely pursue,
It should be left for me to gather,
I am its sculptor, mine would be the hammer. — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

She prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had loved him despite all their doubts, and she felt an irresistible longing to begin life with him over again so that they could say what they had left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly in the past. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left. — Eric Hobsbawm

When I look over my past, I see that the stages in my life are like the phases of the moon. I've had periods where I was the waxing gibbous: fat with wealth and success. There have been other seasons when my happiness was like the waning crescent and I watched my joy fade away slowly, merging with the atmosphere around me as if it never existed. Then I felt as if I was left with nothing more than an illusion, but happiness returns in time and glows once more in corpulent fullness. It's time that makes the difference. — Amy Neftzger

Whether white, black, Asian, or Latino, American students rarely arrive at college as habitual readers, which means that few of them have more than a nominal connection to the past. It is absurd to speak, as does the academic left, of classic Western texts dominating and silencing everyone but a ruling elite or white males. The vast majority of white students do not know the intellectual tradition that is allegedly theirs any better than black or brown ones do. They have not read its books, and when they do read them, they may respond well, but they will not respond in the way that the academic left supposes. For there is only one 'hegemonic discourse' in the lives of American undergraduates, and that is the mass media. Most high schools can't begin to compete against a torrent of imagery and sound that makes every moment but the present seem quaint, bloodless, or dead. — David Denby

But the arrogance of old age can cloak itself in the authority of past accomplishments, which can serve to confirm the belief that one's arrogance is justly held. It can shield a man from the realization that his beliefs have calcified, that he can no longer assess a situation accurately at first glance, that the world has changed around him and left him behind. Guarded from this knowledge, he remains content. — Dexter Palmer

She said that what was in the past was best left there and that talking about it was like stirring a fresh cow pile with a wooden spoon. Didn't accomplish a thing, and only made the stink and the flies worse and the spoon useless for anything else. Then — Carolyn Brown

There is no more time for us left to revive our great country. No more time to repeat our mistakes of the past. Washington needs a complete turnaround, and Donald Trump is the agent of change, and he will be the leader of the change we need. — Rudy Giuliani

But their shoulders were as straight as they had been in the past: in the classroom, on the stage, at the Sabbath table. So there were other sources, too, of pride, and they had not left everything behind. — Lois Lowry

In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were [someone to] drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside. Our Planck is one of them, and that is why we love him. — Albert Einstein

Anyone who says the past was perfect is a liar and wasn't there. Everything that thinks can aspire, and everything that aspires wants something better than what they've left behind them. — Seanan McGuire

The past never quite disappeared, did it? Folks usually thought time moved forward, starting on the left and riding a right-pointing arrow into the future. Ruby didn't believe that. The future twisted uncertain, a shapeless dream, but the past - the past was set. It cast evidence behind it, photos and letters and bones, piling up in hidden places, waiting for the chance to spill out. An avalanche. A burial. The past consumed the future, always. — Brandy Heineman

They travel through the night on the wings of heavenly stallions bringing hope and new faith to those left behind. Even though they are free, they never forget their past and spend their lives trying to bring peace to others. (Brotherhood Chanson) — Kinley MacGregor

He could swear he did not look back, could not - by any optical chance, or in any prism - have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite picture of her standing where he left her. The picture - which penetrated him, through an eye in the back of his head, through his vitreous spinal canal, and could never be lived down, never - consisted of a selection and blend of such random images and expressions of hers that had affected him with a pang of intolerable remorse at various moments in the past. — Vladimir Nabokov

I set my face toward the sun again, and I think about my old life - the one I feel as though I've abandoned somehow. It hurts to think of it that way. And even though I know it wasn't perfect, I look back now, and all I see is perfection. Every soft whisper, every spoken word, every gentle touch - it's all perfect. Time won't let me see it otherwise. They're all just perfect memories - perfect, untouchable moments that came and went so softly that they almost feel as if they were always just a dream. — Laura Miller

I saw his eyes go up and he looked past me, toward the door, as if he were watching it, waiting. But there was no one there, it did not open, no one left or came in. I wondered if he was actually dreaming of escape. — S.J. Watson

I know that sometimes things should be left in the past, that knowing isn't always better. Sometimes the truth is so horrible that it must be uncovered in bits and pieces, snippets here and there, absorbed slowly, as the whole of it at once is simply too shocking to bear.
And sometimes the truth changes everything... — Gary L. Stewart

When you start working, everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave. — John Cage

The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year ... A year ago, the Obama supporters were the passionate ones. Now the tea party brigades have all the intensity. — David Brooks

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts ... .We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need - not all the time, surely, but from time to time - to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember - the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived. — Frederick Buechner

We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever - the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.
All this happened so long ago. And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgodby. So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen.
But this was something I knew nothing of as I closed the gate and set off across the meadow. — J.L. Carr

Fathers left distinctive footprints; sons should think of noble footsteps — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

And right then it felt like I finally understood where everything was, eternity, the heart , the soul. It was like I was sharing every experience I'd ever had in my past 13 years. And then, the next moment, I became unbearably sad. I didn't know what to do with these feeling. Her warmth, her soul. How was I supposed to treat them? That, I did not know. Then right then, I clearly understood that we would never be together. Our lives not yet fully realized, the vast expanse of time. They lay before us and there was nothing we could do. But then, all my worries, all my doubt, started melting away. All that was left were Akari's soft lips on mine. — Makoto Shinkai

Some of the History Channel's documentaries involve docudrama segments and are highly speculative - but there seems, on the part of the producers, to be a real determination to get at the history behind our past - not the sex, which is left to drama shows and entertainment channels. — Nigel Hamilton

The truth is that I don't have any more energy than anyone else. I might get up earlier in the morning than most, but I go to bed earlier too. I am almost never at a party past midnight. I greet all I meet, make sure I am visible then use the "toilet-excuse" and go home and to bed. That way, everyone has seen that I was at the party, but nobody noticed when I left.

There is nothing that is called "hero all day, hero all night."

You have to choose. — Petter A. Stordalen

Not a single star will be left in the night. The night will not be left. I will die and, with me, the weight of the intolerable universe. I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions, the continents and faces. I shall erase the accumulated past. I shall make dust of history, dust of dust. Now I am looking on the final sunset. I am hearing the last bird. I bequeath nothingness to no one. — Jorge Luis Borges

Me?" he said in some surprise. "I won't be dancing! It's the bridal dance. The bride and groom dance alone!"
For one circuit of the room," she told him. "After which they are joined by the best man and first bridesmaid, then by the groomsman and the second bridesmaid."
Will reacted as he had been stung. He leaned over to speak across Jenny on his left, to Gilan.
Gil! Did you know we have to dance?" he asked. Gilan nodded enthusiastically.
Oh yes indeed. Jenny and I have been practicing for the past three days, haven't we, Jen?"
Jenny looked up at him adoringly and nodded. Jenny was in love. Gilan was tall, dashing, good-looking, charming and very ammusing. Plus he was cloaked in the mystery and romance tat came with being a Ranger. Jenny had only ever known one ranger and that had been grim-faced, gray-bearded Halt. — John Flanagan

If you can cut yourself - your mind - free of what other
people do and say, of what you've said or done, of the things
that you're afraid will happen, the impositions of the body
that contains you and the breath within, and what the whirling
chaos sweeps in from outside, so that the mind is freed from
fate, brought to clarity, and lives life on its own recognizance
- doing what's right, accepting what happens, and speaking
the truth
If you can cut free of impressions that cling to the mind,
free of the future and the past - can make yourself, as
Empedocles says, "a sphere rejoicing in its perfect
stillness," and concentrate on living what can be lived
(which means the present) ... then you can spend the time
you have left in tranquillity. And in kindness. And at peace
with the spirit within you. — Marcus Aurelius

There seemed to be nothing left in the world, for I felt that Roland had taken with him all my future and Edward all my past. — Vera Brittain

The things we are attached to are no more than shadows of the past. However, we do not recognize that, and, as long as we hold on to them, they become part of the present and follow us around. Let's say there's a wound you suffered long ago. The wound closed and left a large or small scar. It's only a scar, and it doesn't interfere at all with you living a healthy life. But for a person who believes the wound is still open, even pain that has since left will return and the closed wound will become infected. — Ilchi Lee

Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to crime: the realistically detailed police procedural, usually grim and downbeat, and the more left-field, joyous theatre of ideas in which past masters once specialised. Knowing that I would never be able to handle the former, I set about reviving the latter. — Christopher Fowler

Guide to the world of the dead. When you are certain that the body has left you, feel sad for the good you didn't get to do; then stop feeling sad and begin your journey to the past. Feel happy for the evil you didn't get to do, then stop feeling happy and realize that what propels you is chance, which when you were going in the opposite direction seemed to you like order, or necessity. — Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Nine times out of ten, failure is resorting to Plan B when Plan A gets too risky, too costly, or too difficult. That's why most people are living their Plan B. They didn't burn the ships. Plan A people don't have a Plan B...

There are moments in life when we need to burn the ships to our past. We do so by making a defining decision that will eliminate the possibility of sailing back to the old world we left behind. You burn the ships named Past Failure and Past Success. You burn the ship named Bad Habit. You burn the ship named Regret. You burn the ship named Guilt. You burn the ship named My Old Way of Life. — Mark Batterson

Our culture is obsessed with perfection, especially when it comes to the way women look. The parameters of acceptability as far as physical appearance go are so limiting that only a handful of women actually fall into this category. And the rest of us are left to either squeeze ourselves into molds that don't fit, hating ourselves all the while, or we just give up entirely. — Yancy Lael

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misplaced even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing- persons reports, then moved on themselves. — Joan Didion

Phileas Fogg, having shut the door of his house at half-past eleven, and having put his right foot before his left five hundred and seventy-five times, and his left foot before his right five hundred and seventy-six times, reached the Reform Club — Jules Verne

Hey, this is Europe. We took it from nobody; we won it from the bare soil that the ice left. The bones of our ancestors, and the stones of their works, are everywhere. Our liberties were won in wars and revolutions so terrible that we do not fear our governors: they fear us. Our children giggle and eat ice-cream in the palaces of past rulers. We snap our fingers at kings. We laugh at popes. When we have built up tyrants, we have brought them down. And we have nuclear ********* weapons. — Ken MacLeod

There are so few people left alive from back then, you may as well be talking to them about the Black Death. Nobody recalls the shite in the 30s and that were fucking horrible. For Christ's sake, nobody wants to remember the shite in the 80s. It's all forgotten and swept under the rug by the newspapers and the BBC. They get nostalgic about the music, but they never want to mention the misery. It's all shite. As for the bloody Second World War, the politicians only talk about it when they need an excuse to go pissing about in one of those fucking Muslim countries. — Harry Leslie Smith

Somewhere beyond the battening, urged sweep of three-bedroom houses rushing by their thousands across all the dark beige hills, somehow implicit in an arrogance or bite to the smog the more inland somnolence of San Narciso did lack, lurked the sea, the unimaginable Pacific, the one to which all surfers, beach pads, sewage disposal schemes, tourist incursions, sunned homosexuality, chartered fishing are irrelevant, the hole left by the moon's tearing-free and monument to her exile; you could not hear or even smell this but it was there, something tidal began to reach feelers in past eyes and eardrums, perhaps to arouse fractions of brain current your most gossamer microelectrode is yet too gross for finding. — Thomas Pynchon

When I think about the past and how blind I was in that life, I compare it to being a god and losing everything when being cast out. I had the unlimited power to destroy myself and everything around me. It's like having been in a cave for years and I'm finally out of the cave. The sun burns my eyes and skin. I don't recognize my surroundings. No one looks authentic, and now I'm on the hunt for people that have the pieces to my puzzle that will help me on my quest. I have no cave to hide in, and I'm just left with the sediment of a previous life and my own mortality. — Phil Volatile

Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine. — Willa Cather

Frau Elena paces the parlor, her slippers whispering left, whispering right. Coal cars grind past in the wet dark. Machinery hums in the distance: pistons throbbing, belts turning. Smoothly. Madly. — Anthony Doerr

It's Grandmother Dorothy," Elizabeth shrieked as she raced down the stairs, slid on the wooden floor, regained her balance and headed for the front door. "We saw from the window, and she's brought. . . . everybody." "She even brought the puppies!" Thaddeus yelled as he rushed past Millie. "I didn't see my peacocks." Rose charged after her siblings. "They're going to be mad at being left behind." Breaking — Jen Turano

This was what was left of a human individual when you took away his home,his family, his friends, his city, his country,his world: a being without context, whose past had faded, whose future was bleak, an entity stripped of name, of meaning,of the whole of life except a temporarily beating heart. — Salman Rushdie

We keep ourselves so tied up in regretting the past and fearing the future that we don't have any energy left to figure out who we are and what we want to create right now. — Gay Hendricks

Why Your Penis is a Gift
Think of the past as your left pocket,
the future as your right pocket ~
which leaves your penis as the present. — Beryl Dov

Death was hard, I got that, but it was only hard for those you left behind. Life was what was really difficult. Everyone here no longer had to suffer, be in pain, relive past mistakes. They were sleeping on, unaware of the problems around them. Death seemed like the easy way out. Life was harder. — Bailey Ardisone

It could be yesterday
when I was less in love
I think
For I didn't see you in the mirror
behind me
while getting dressed.
The way your hands couldn't stay away
and our bodies always found their ways back to each other
as if they were meant to be together
Close.

But then it was today and I saw you
again
in the mirror
behind me while getting dressed

So I go to sleep tonight
alone
without actually falling asleep because I'm scared of the moment I will wake up
and realise it was just a dream
You're actually gone.

Now all I can do is get through to another tomorrow
hoping that I will be less in love
again
Like yesterday

But not today.
I was never really well with things at all. — Charlotte Eriksson

I don't want to be left in the past. When I stand next to Kylie, Beyonce or Rihanna, I don't want to be a decrepit old lady. — Lulu

Sarah'. She had thought they had thrown that bit of history into the trash, and the trash into the incinerator. But apparently 'Sarah' had only been thrown into a plastic bag and left in the closet under the bathroom sink, where the packet gathered mold and fungus and slowly acquired a signature stink. That stench was now slowly escaping from between the gap of the doors and the bathroom floor.
Sarah was Siddharth's ex. — Shweta Ganesh Kumar

I feel like I've been through a lot in the past couple of years, But I've kept pretty stable. That's because I channel that emotion into performance. I can handle emotion as long as it's only a song. It works for me, and I don't want to change it. I don't have anything left for writing. — Jennifer Echols

I was generally busy from 7 A.M. until midnight. I never had time to sit and think. As I worked, physical and mental fatigue set in and I was unable to operate to the maximum of my intellectual ability. But in a single cell in prison, I had time to think. I had a clear view of my past and present, and I found that my past left much to be desired, both in regard to my relations with other humans and in developing personal worth. — Nelson Mandela

We may now have reached a point where this gap in our make-up has become unsustainable; partly because what in the past would have counted as material plenty has become the norm for the majority in much of the world; and partly because the slow retreat of religion that coincided with the spread of a capitalist economy has left a gaping hole in millions of people's lives. (Geoff Mulgan) — Dalai Lama XIV

As his boots walked towards the old station, he felt as though he were hallucinating. Scary apprehension increased the beat of his heart and the sweat upon his forehead was cold. The reality of where he stood created a sinking feeling inside of him.
An old man everyone called Uncle Tucker once owned this place. His sole existence behind the counter all of the time, day and night. He could have been a creature out of a fairy tale, with his long white beard and equally long white hair. Merlin. The overalls and the ball cap perched upon his head, along with the half-smoked cigar with an endless burning orb positioned in his mouth. It made him a fixture in time. He wondered if Tucker would still be alive. Tucker with his endless stories of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, and flower children. A man that never left a country thousands of miles away where bicycles filled the capital. A man who never left those fields where killing occurred. — Jaime Allison Parker

i am confident i am over you. so much that some mornings i wake up with a smile on my face and my hands pressed together thanking the universe for pulling you out of me. thank god i cry. thank god you left. i would not be the empire i am today if you had stayed.

but then.

there are some nights i imagine what i might do if you showed up. how if you walked into the room this very second every awful thing you've ever done would be tossed out the closet window and all the love would rise up again. it would pour through my eyes as if it never really left in the first place. as if it's been practicing how to stay silent so long only so it could be this loud on your arrival. can someone explain that. how even when the love leaves. it doesn't leave. how even when i am so past you. i am so helplessly brought back to you. — Rupi Kaur

Time had past indeed: it had overtaken him and gone ahead. It had left him hopelessly behind with a few poor gifts: the iron grey hair, the heavy fatigue of the tanned face, two scars, a pair of tarnished shoulderstraps; one of those steady, reliable men who are the raw material of great reputations, one of those unaccounted lives that are buried without drums and trumpets under the foundations of monumental success. — Joseph Conrad

An origin, I repeat, is not confined to the past: it is a whirlwind, in Benjamin's very fine image, a chasm in the present. And we are drawn into this abyss. That is why the present is, par excellence, the thing that is left unlived. — Anonymous

There outside there is a lot of stuff which you learn, the clock illusion, that you live in the past, that you can survive without a brain but not for long period...What Is Consciousness? And many other stuff... (so the question which has left, do you have the time to do it?) — Deyth Banger

The thing is, when you say haunted house you think ghosts and goblins and things that go boo in the night. But there are certain places that you go, certain places that trigger memories inside you that are better left in the past. That's what makes the place haunted. — Terry King

the chambers and passages of the cave system. A track led past both entrances, and round up onto the hill-top, up which sloping trail Yana now wearily pulled herself. Some huts were private dwelling places while others were the domain of certain crafts. Community meetings were held either outside in a large space deliberately left clear in the centre of the huts, or during cold or inclement weather, in the larger of the two entrance chambers of the cave system. Yana moved aside the leather windbreak sheltering the entrance to the hut which was her family's home and walked down the four stone-flagged steps to the floor of the sunken hut. A strong herbal odour hung in the air. Ignoring it, Yana dropped her kill by the fire, and made her way to the occupied sleeping platform at — Julie Reilly

Over the past year, since breaking up with Martin, she had begun to notice the foreignness of the place, to suffer from the chill that dried her skin and never really left her, even in the summer. And yet she couldn't make up her mind to leave. She depended on the place now; she had grown attached to it with the obstinacy with which people become attached only to things that hurt them. — Paolo Giordano

I flung open the door. I got a momentary flash of about a hundred and fifteen cats of all sizes and colours scrapping in the middle of the room, and then they all shot past me with a rush and out of the front door; and all that was left of the mobscene was the head of a whacking big fish, lying on the carpet and staring up at me in a rather austere sort of way, as if it wanted a written explanation and apology. — P.G. Wodehouse

When he looks at her, I can tell his eyes are locked on something in the past
something that seared deeply and left the worst kind of scar: the inside kind. — Emily Murdoch

Love seems to survive life, and to reach beyond it. I think we take it with us past the grave. Do we not still give it to those who have left us? May we not hope that they feel it for us, and that we shall leave it here in one or two fond bosoms, when we also are gone? — William Makepeace Thackeray