Quotes & Sayings About Not Going Back To The Past

A Farewell For a while I shall still be leaving, Looking back at you as you slip away Into the magic islands of the mind. But for a while now all alive, believing That in a single poignant hour We did say all that we could ever say In a great flowing out of radiant power. It was like seeing and then going blind. After a while we shall be cut in two Between real islands where you live And a far shore where I'll no longer keep The haunting image of your eyes, and you, As pupils widen, widen to deep black And I am able neither to love or grieve Between fulfillment and heartbreak. The time will come when I can go to sleep. But for a while still, centered at last, Contemplate a brief amazing union, Then watch you leave and then let you go. I must not go back to the murderous past Nor force a passage through to some safe landing, But float upon this moment of communion Entranced, astonished by pure understanding - Passionate love dissolved like summer snow. — May Sarton

Not every girl has a bad-boy problem. Some of my friends get into relationships constantly. Others cheat all the time, or run away. Some get jealous. Some think they are too undateable to even try. Our dating pool is a circus of fuckups, misfits, and past mistakes that we keep on making. The brand of baggage you're carrying on your back is the issue. But most of all, I think we fear the same thing. I think that thing is love. Real love. Think of your first love. Think of how Bambi-like you were, prancing around all excited and in love with everything. Then think of how that happiness was beaten to death with a hatchet, spit on, shit on, leaving you cold. If you watch something you care about get destroyed, you're not going to want to go back to that place, no matter how pleasant it ever was. — Alida Nugent

If you yourself do not cut the lines that tie you to the dock, God will have to use a storm to sever them and to send you out to sea.
You have to get out past the harbor into the great dephts of God, and begin to know things for yourself ... beg in to have spiritual discernment.
Beware of paying attention or going back to what you once were, when God wants you to be something that you have never been. — Oswald Chambers

Taking a deep breath, he got ready to die.
He hoped that Tamara and Aaron had made it past the Chaos-ridden, out the window, and back on the path toward the Magisterium.
He hoped that, since Havoc was Chaos-ridden, the Enemy wouldn't be too hard on him for not being an evil zombie dog.
He hoped his dad wouldn't be too mad at him for going to the Magisterium and getting killed, just the way he had always been warned he would.
He hoped Master Rufus wouldn't give his spot to Jasper. — Cassandra Clare

Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way. — Edna Ferber

But I don't want to go back. Not yet.
Just because.
Because every once in a while, somebody brings me my lunch tray and my meds and he has a black eye or his forehead is swollen with stitches, and he says:
"We miss you Mr. Durden."
Or somebody with a broken nose pushes a mop past me and whispers:
"Everything's going according to the plan.
Whispers
"We're going to break up civilization so we can make something better out of the world."
Whispers
"We look forward to getting you back. — Chuck Palahniuk

It's huge!"
"That's what she said!"
Cue riotous laughter as our bus rumbles past Big Ben.
I want to roll my eyes, but I'm afraid pretty soon they're going to get stuck in the back of my head, and penis puns are really not worth my permanent facial damage.
By the time our bus pulls up to the Tower of London, my expectations for the day are somewhere in the basement. Call me a cynic, but since Jason spent the entire time we toured Big Ben talking about how satisfied Mrs Ben must be, my guess is that a landmark famous for its crown jewels is not going to bring out his most charming comments, either. — Lauren Morrill

Dan gestured past Neil toward the changing room. "What happened?" Neil counted it off on his fingers. "Kevin told them Coach is his father, said he's never going back to Edgar Allan, and called the Ravens out as two-faced assholes. Oh," he said, looking up from his hand, "and he said his injury wasn't an accident. Not in so many words, but it won't take them long to figure out what he meant." Dan gaped. "He what?" "Great," Wymack said. "He's turning into another you. That's just what I needed. — Nora Sakavic

When we're back on our own time, then you can get competitive. Until we solve this, cut it the fuck out, or you are going to seriously piss me off."
Edward got slowly to his feet. I backed away out of reach. I'd never seen him use martial arts before, but I put nothing past him.
A sound made me back up further until I could see Edward and Marks without looking away from Edward. Marks was making a small sniggering sound. It took me a moment to realize he was laughing, laughing so hard his face was purplish and he seemed to be having trouble breathing.
Edward and I both stared at him.
When Marks could finally talk, he said, "You kick a man in the face, and that's not seriously pissed off."
He straightened, hand to his side like he had a stitch in it. "What the fuck do you call seriously pissed? — Laurell K. Hamilton

Easy squeezed her hand and tugged her closer. She sucked in a breath, sure he was going to kiss her. He did. Just not how she'd thought. His lips pressed to her forehead, then he pulled back to look her in the eye. I see a woman who's made me fell more alive in the past few days than I have in a long, long time. — Laura Kaye

THE MEETING GOT under way as soon as Marshall walked into the room. He looked dignified and serious, and he was wearing a dark suit. There were three men at the conference table, across from him, from a company in Boston that was not quite as large as UPI, but very close, and its growth rate had been remarkable in the past two years. It was well on its way to becoming the largest corporation in the country and outstripping all its competitors. And all it needed now was a powerful leader at its helm. And everyone at its base in Boston had agreed that Marshall Weston was the one. They had no idea if he would consider leaving UPI, and they doubted it after fifteen years, but they had come to California to try and convince him to do it. And he was listening raptly to what they said. It was their second meeting in two days, and they were going back to Boston that night. Marshall — Danielle Steel

I've got blisters and muscle cramps in places not meant for the touch of anything but a beautiful woman," Max spat back sullenly. "I've bitten my tongue so many times in the past three days that I whistle in musical chords when I exhale. And the smell isn't ever going to come out of my armor, I just know it. — Jim Butcher

The present illegitimacy ratio is not only unprecedented in the past two centuries; it is unprecedented, so far as we know, in American history going back to colonial times, and in English history from Tudor times. — Gertrude Himmelfarb

The only thing we can control is what we do in the present. The more we replay yesterday, the further we get from today's opportunities. And the further away we move from opportunities, the tougher the road is to get back. Opportunities never look as good coming as they do going, and they wait for no one. We need to be highly attentive to spot them. And we must be focused on our present capabilities, not past regrets. — John C. Maxwell

Oh, God in heaven, kill me now ... " Rachel groaned. "I hate going to see Mrak. I always feel awkward going back to Velik Tor. After being a Scorpion for so long, after everything Oron's told us about Mrak's past ... " she shook her head darkly. "I don't know if I'll be able to resist the temptation to perforate his bowels."
Notak looked back down at the letter. "Post script," he read aloud. "Rachel, please leave Mrak alive and unharmed. We still need him, unfortunately, no matter how tempting it is to perforate his bowels."
"You made that up, he did not say that!"
Notak handed her the letter, pointing. "Right there at the bottom."
Rachel squinted at the writing. "Faul. — S.G. Night

Louise, I would gladly fire the past for you, go and not look back. I have been reckless before, never counting the cost, oblivious to the cost. Now, I've done the sums ahead. I know what it will mean to redeem myself from the accumulations of a lifetime. I know and I don't care. You set before me a space uncluttered by association. It might be a void or it might be a release. Certainly I want to take the risk. I want to take the risk because the life I have stored up is going mouldy. — Jeanette Winterson

... When you're in the darkness, know that the light will come. We are light and dark, sun and moon, male and female, yin and yang; life is composed of opposites, in a continuing cycle of change ... . When you are in the light, don't step back into the darkness. Live in that light, and breathe it in fully. I've spent so much of my life going over and over the sadness and fear of the past. But we don't need to go there when we're not there. When we are in the light, be here, now. — Kathryn E. Livingston

Honoria couldn't help but watch her make her way over to
Daisy, and Mr. Bridgerton said, "Don't worry, she's mostly
harmless."
"My cousin Daisy?" she asked dubiously.
"No," he replied, momentarily nonplussed. "Lady Danbury."
Honoria looked past him to Daisy and Lady Danbury. "Is she
deaf?"
"Your cousin Daisy?"
"No, Lady Danbury."
"I don't believe so."
"Oh." Honoria winced. "That's too bad. She might be by the
time Daisy is through with her.
"That's not going to end well," he murmured.
Honoria could do nothing but shake her head and murmur,
"No."
"Is your cousin fond of her toes?"
Honoria blinked in confusion. "I believe so, yes."
"She'll want to watch that cane, then."
Honoria looked back just in time to see Daisy let out a small
shriek as she tried to jump back. She was not successful with the
latter; Lady Danbury's cane had her pinned rather firmly. — Julia Quinn

Even if you do not want to, One day
you will look back through your
life ... the Question is, what are you
going to see? How will your rate and
direction of progress make you feel? — Moffat Machingura

Now there is no taboo; everything is allowed. But one cannot simply go back to tonality, it's not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape. — Gyorgy Ligeti

ADAMSBERG WAS NOT A MAN WHO WENT IN FOR EMOTION: he skirted around strong feelings with caution, like swifts who only brush past windows with their wings, never going in, because they know it will be difficult to get out. He had often found dead birds in the village houses back home, imprudent visitors who had ventured inside and never again found their way back to the open air. Adamsberg considered that when it came to love, humans were no wiser than birds. — Fred Vargas

A primordial instinct going back to humanity's tribal past makes us see difference as a threat. That instinct is massively dysfunctional in an age in which our several destinies are interlinked. Oddly enough, it is the market -- the least overtly spiritual of concepts -- that delivers a profoundly spiritual message: that it is through exchange that difference becomes a blessing, not a curse. When difference leads to war, both sides lose. When it leads to mutual enrichment, both sides gain. — Jonathan Sacks

Everybody changes. I love fashion, and I love changing my style, my hair, my makeup, and everything I've done in the past has made me what I am now. Not everyone is going to like what I do, but I look back at everything, and it makes me smile. — Victoria Beckham

You promised I could be there the first time! What if you two run past something reflective?"
"Alice-," Edward protested.
"It will only take a second!"
And with that, Alice darted from the room.
Edward sighed.
"What is she talking about?"
But Alice was already back, carrying the huge, gilt-framed mirror from Rosalie's room, which was nearly twice as tall as she was, and several times as wide.
"Edward gave me grief for not getting you to a mirror before the wedding," Alice said, pulling my attention away from her frightening lover. "I'm not going to be chewed out again. — Stephenie Meyer

God had told the survivors of Sodom and Gomorrah not to look back after they'd been rescued from death and destruction, and if Jo's family continued to gaze into the past, they were going to become stuck in place like pillars of salt, too. — Lynn Austin

Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia. — Thomas Merton

A few miles away across the East River was the apartment he could never get used to, the job where he had nothing to do, the dozen or so people he knew slightly and cared about not at all: a fabric of existence as blank and seamless as the freshly plaster wall he passed. Soon his wife would return from New Jersey. Soon everyone would be back, and things would go on much as they had before. From the street outside came the sound of laughter and shouting, bottles breaking, voices droning in the warm air, and children playing far past their bedtime. It all meant nothing whatever to Lowell. Standing in the parlor of a house no longer his, listening to the voices of people whose lives were closed to him forever, contemplating a future much like his past, he realized that it was finally too late for him. Everything had gone wrong, and he had succeeded at nothing, and he was never going to have any kind of life at all. — L.J. Davis

I'm not going to live with you!" a small voice shouted from the kitchen doorway.
Beth looked past Keith to see Ben, his expression horrified. Ben started to back away. "I'm not going to do it! — Nicholas Sparks

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

The movie, (X-Men: Days of Future Past), illustrates a spiritual journey that involves going back in time. The Purpose of the journey is to find the core grievance and let it be healed. When the grievance is healed in Forgiveness, all future scenarios of conflict and destruction are also healed. It is not that they have been prevented in time; it is that we have come to the realization that there was no time in which they could have existed. In the Happy Dream, everything is resolved. It becomes harmonious and then disappears.
Wolverine is the agent strong enough to go back through time and ignite the mission of forgiveness. We can think of ourselves this way as well. We can imagine that our future self, or our higher Self, is orchestrating this whole thing for our awakening. We are just perceiving it in time, where we perceive ourselves to be. There is great love and compassion coming from the higher Self, the future self. — David Hoffmeister

I have a lot faith in the younger generation of music lovers. Youth isn't living in the past; if somebody tells them that there's something better than what they have, they're going to check it out. And if they like it, they're going to get it. I'm not worried about the youth. Young people aren't just looking back, they are also looking forward. — Neil Young

And if anger and fear could persist - then also, of course, stronger emotions could as well, such as love. Was that what drew some people back to reincarnate within their own families? Was that what caused some children to remember their past connections? And if so, then perhaps this phenomenon, these children's memories he had studied so carefully, was not against the laws of nature, after all. Perhaps it was the foundational law of nature that they were proving, what he'd been documenting and analyzing for over thirty years without knowing it: the force of love. He shook his head. His brain was going soft, maybe. Or maybe not. He'd kept so many of these questions at bay all these years, and now they whirled around him, touching him with something like awe, on their way to someplace else. — Sharon Guskin

Just because you have been through a bad experience does not give you the ticket to keep going back to that situation over and over again and dramatizing it out of proportion. — Stephen Richards

I'm going to Bristol," Matthew said desperately. "I'll reschedule the meetings. I won't do anything without your leave. But at least I can gather information - interview the local transport firm, have a look at their horses - "
"Swift," the earl interrupted. Something in his quiet tone, a note of ... kindness? ... sympathy? ... caused Matthew to stiffen defensively. "I understand the reason for your urgency - "
"No, you don't."
"I understand more than you might think. And in my experience, these problems can't be solved by avoidance. You can never run far or fast enough."
Matthew froze, staring at Westcliff. The earl could have been referring either to Daisy, or to Matthew's tarnished past. In either case he was probably right.
Not that it changed anything.
"Sometimes running is the only choice," Matthew replied gruffly, and left the room without looking back. — Lisa Kleypas

Let me try," he said, and he took the ends and positioned
himself in front of her mirror.
She watched him for about two seconds before declaring,
"You're going to have to go home."
His eyes did not leave the reflection of his neckcloth in the
mirror. "I haven't even got past the first knot."
"And you're not going to."
He gave her a supercilious look, brow quirked and all.
"You're never going to get it right," she pronounced. "I must
say, between this and your boots, I am revising my opinion on the
impracticalities of couture, male versus female."
"Really?"
Her gaze dropped to his boots, polished to a perfect shine. "No
one has ever had to take a knife to my footwear."
"I wear nothing that buttons up the back," he countered.
"True, but I may choose a dress that buttons in the front,
whereas you cannot go out and about without a neckcloth. — Julia Quinn

You can only live on the past for so long, and we kind of stretched our luck on that. We think we're on the way back, but it's just a matter of how quickly things come together. Common sense tells you it's not going to happen overnight because we're trying to catch up. — Richard Petty

There is no going back. Study the past to know why, not what, and from the why, dream and do. There is no shortcut to creation. There may also be no profit in it. — Elizabeth Ann Coleman

I hit you. Won't that make you go away? What else can I do?" he snarled. He'd fallen back on his old standby, anger.
"I'm not going away, Cole, so maybe we can cut out the assaults in the future. You don't want me to go away. I know that. You love me, Cole. That's the feeling that makes you so angry." She'd sighed and looked at the ceiling. "You don't know what to do with it, because the people you've loved in the past caused you pain. That's what you think love is. Pain."
She'd looked at his face until he met her eyes. They were still green.
"But, Cole, I love you. Have I hurt you? Ever?"
Cole had to shake his head. She hadn't. Not once.
"I'm showing you what to do with love, Cole." She stood and held out her arms.
A hug. A simple hug he didn't have to earn by throwing a chair. Human contact that wasn't required because he was trying to hurt someone. She still trusted him. She still saw something in him. — Debra Anastasia

We are not going back to the failed policies of the past. We are fighting for the middle class! — Nancy Pelosi

People who are focused on the past will quickly become a weight that will hold you back. You must break free from those relationships and embrace those who will take you to your future. Link yourself up with those who are going somewhere. Seek out those who have a vision for their lives, and find your place at their table. These are the people who will open the door to your destiny. These types of individuals will not waste time, nor are they looking — Robb Thompson