Quotes & Sayings About Not Looking Back And Moving On

Home: I found her in her back drawing-room, where the wide windows opened to the water. The room was dusky - it was too hot for lamps - and she sat slowly moving her fan and looking out on the little arm of the sea which is so pretty at night, reflecting the lights of Cambridgeport and Charlestown. I supposed she was musing on the loved ones she was to leave behind, her married daughters, her grandchildren; but she struck — Henry James

I looked back to see if she was looking back to see me look back. She didn't. Suddenly a thick layer of mist covered her and I only saw a silhouette in black moving away from me. Slowly it turned into a shadow and then a dot. Strong wind blew the fog. She had gone from my life like the way she came. — Shahid Hussain Raja

The room was silent, just the low murmur of Sports Center coming from the television. Ruxs' eyes were on the sports announcers but he wasn't listening to them. He could feel Green's strong presence. It called to him. He heard him rustling in his chair and turned to look in his direction. Green was still reclined all the way back. He was looking at the TV, his eyes heavy, one hand down inside his lounge pants. Ruxs could see his hand moving. Oh my God. Ruxs had an urge to rub his own aching balls. Shit. Poor things. They'd been sorely neglected for months. He — A.E. Via

Everything felt fragile and freshly come upon, but for now, at least, my depression had stepped back, giving me room to move forward. I had forgotten what it was like to be without it, and for a moment I floundered, wondering how I would recognize myself. I knew for certain it would return, sneaking up on me when I wasn't looking, but meanwhile there were bound to be glimpses of light if only I stayed around and held fast to the long perspective. It was a chance that seemed worth taking. — Daphne Merkin

Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn't enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is the ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways. — Rose Tremain

Looking back on months and years of intimacy, to feel that your friend, while you still remember the moving words you exchanged, is yet growing distant and living in a world apart - all this is sadder far than partings brought by death. — Yoshida Kenko

Isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation are among the wiles we use to keep ourselves from dispelling every illusion that keeps us up and running. Without this cognitive double-dealing, we would be exposed for what we are. It would be like looking into a mirror and for a moment seeing the skull inside our skin looking back at us with its sardonic smile. And beneath the skull - only blackness, nothing. Someone is there, so we feel, and yet no one is there - the uncanny paradox, all the horror in a glimpse. A little piece of our world has been peeled back, and underneath is creaking desolation - a carnival where all the rides are moving but no patrons occupy the seats. We are missing from the world we have made for ourselves. Maybe if we could resolutely gaze wide-eyed at our lives we would come to know what we really are. But that would stop the showy attraction we are inclined to think will run forever.8 — Thomas Ligotti

All I wanted to do was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet, but when I would wake in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for it already. Now, looking out the tunnel of trees over the ravine at the sky with white clouds moving across in the wind, I loved the country so that I was happy as you are after you have been with a woman that you really love, when, empty, you feel it welling up again and there it is and you can never have it all and yet what there is, now, you can have, and you want more and more, to have, and be, and live in, to possess now again for always, for that long sudden-ended always; making time stand still, sometimes so very still that afterwards you wait to hear it move, and it is slow in starting. But you are not alone because if you have every really loved her happy and untragic, she loves you always; no matter whom she loves nor where she goes she loves you more. — Ernest Hemingway,

You know you're in a good place when you no longer are interested in looking back. You prefer to enjoy the journey. — Karen Salmansohn

Looking back now, I would say that this was one of the first valuable lessons I learned, and one that would be useful in my future line of work. Sometimes things go wrong. It is inevitable. But it is a mistake to waste time and energy worrying about events that you cannot influence. Once they have happened, let them go. — Anthony Horowitz

This sense of being out of time has driven thousands of people from their homes into moving-picture theaters where new universes appear before them, with emphasis on man and his major problem: a thing called, conveniently, love. The Sunday midnight shows do a thriving business, and the people go back to their homes, sick with the sickness of frustration; it is this that makes the city so interesting at night: the people emerging from the theaters, smoking cigarettes and looking desperate, wanting much, the precision, the glory, all the loveliness of life: wanting what is finest and getting nothing. It is saddening to see them, but there is mockery in the heart: one walks among them, laughing at oneself and at them, their midnight staring. — William, Saroyan

SIMONE
"It comes up inside me and it won't go away. It comes up, like a slow geyser of thick chemicals, and spreads through me. It makes me want something. I want it so much but I don't know what it is. It comes up from the bottom like a small seed, just floating there, and it bleeds around inside, looking for me."

The empty loading dock corridor. Empty trailers. Her shoes on broken glass. Ice cubes. Her hands.

SIMONE
"And it makes me so sad that I will never figure out what it is, just enough to let it be, all by itself. And because I want it, it won't go away. It needs me to need it. And want me back. I can feel it moving. I can hear it and I can see it. I can almost touch it, and it is some kind of life. It is beautiful and warm and gentle and it is your friend. And then it turns, when you try to put it away, or when you can't carry it anymore, and it isn't allowed. — Jeff Wood

That (labyrinth)...became a world whose rules I lived by, and I understood the moral of mazes: sometimes you have to turn your back on your goal to get there, sometimes you're farthest away when you're closest, sometimes the only way is the long one. After that careful walking and looking down, the stillness was deeply moving...It was breathtaking to realize that in the labyrinth, metaphors and meanings could be conveyed spatially. That when you seem farthest from your destination is when you suddenly arrive is a very pat truth in words, but a profound one to find with your feet. — Rebecca Solnit

Looking back is a form of insanity, given that I could really never understand what everybody else was thinking. I find these days that I'm much more efficient when I just focus on what I need to do in order to move my family forward and get the focus off me. — Grant Bowler

He nods, looking through the pictures on the screen on the back of his camera. Some relationships can only exist as memories. But unlike ephemeral digital images that can be sorted and deleted, we can't erase the past. We have to learn to live with all the images that are stored in love's archive, memories tagged good and bad. No Photoshopping. Accept the negative before moving forward. — Shannon Mullen

You could have had this instead. But going back is false. Moving ahead is false. Looking the other way is false. Trying to redress all that is false turns out to be just as false. — Andre Aciman

A naked woman was amazing.

He'd never seen it this way, in full light, without half-off clothes or a beach blanket across the lap or sex in a dark car. This was her whole body naked in light, standing and lying and front and back and open and showing and then different when she walked, surer than he was, unclunky and smooth-moving, with parts that didn't bounce. She knew how to be naked. She looked like she'd been raised naked in this room, a skinny girl when she was a girl, probably, and skinny in a certain way, with a little bulgy belly and ashamed of her feet, but grown out of shyness and wrong proportions now, and being married of course, used to being seen, and she didn't have curves and swerves but was good looking naked and stuck to him when they fucked like a thing fighting for light, a great wet papery moth. — Don DeLillo

There isn't one thing in particular; rather, a lot of different things give me inspiration. I tend to come up with tunes when I do things that are not part of my daily routine, like traveling. But even during my everyday life, I come up with tunes when I'm emotionally moved. By looking at a beautiful picture, scenery, tasting something delicious, scents that bring back memories, happy and sad things ... Anything that moves my emotion gives me inspiration. — Yoko Shimomura

The only thing a person can ever really do is keep moving forward. Take that big leap forward without hesitation, without once looking back. Simply forget the past and forge toward the future. — Alyson Noel

So yesterday the high-ranking visitors came after all. . . H[immler} at their head. A slight, insignificant-looking little man, with a rather good-humored face. High peaked cap, mustache, and small spectacles. I think: If you wanted to trace back all the misery and horror to just one person, it would have to be him. Around him a lot of fellows with weary faces. Very big, heavily dressed men, they swerve along whichever way he turns, like a swarm of flies, changing places among themselves (they don't stand still for a moment) and moving like a single whole. It makes a fatally alarming impression. (January 30, 1944) — David Koker

Cash misses his wife with a blank pain in his chest, and he misses his sisters and cousins, who have known him since he was a strong, good-looking boy. Everyone back there remembers, or if they are too young, they've been told. The old ones get to hang on the sweet, perfect past. Cash was the best at climbing trees; his sister Letty won the story bees. The woman who married Letty's husband's brother, a beauty named Sugar, was spotted one time drinking a root beer and had her picture in LIFE magazine. They all know. Now she has thin hair and a humped back but she's still Sugar, she gets to walk around Heaven, Oklahoma, with everybody thinking she's pretty and special. which she is. That's the trouble with moving away from family, he realizes. You lose your youth entirely, you have only the small tired baggage that is carried within the body. — Barbara Kingsolver

Every moment wasted looking back, keeps us from moving forward. — Hillary Rodham Clinton

The hardest part about moving on is - not looking back. — Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

The view was breathtaking. Her gaze swept out across the splendid, exciting square. Yes, she could see the horizon, the view so much more sweeping than she had expected. She saw now what Jim had seen, what had been there all the time. So much to do and know, and yes, she could do this.
And then she saw something else. A familiar figure, cap pushed back, walking toward her. She saw him moving closer, saw those clear, blue eyes. She heard a laugh-- whose? Her own. And it was all right. She could be right or wrong, but her vow to herself was clear now. She would be strong and not always too careful, not settle for a smaller life, and face what was true.
What was true? Perhaps it was here, staring her in the face.
"May I help you down?" Jim said. He was standing beneath her now, his hands on the bridle, looking up, his eyes alight.
Palms up, arms stretched out, she reached toward him.
"Yes," she said. — Kate Alcott

Looking back on those days and little leaguer, the Hall of Fame is not even a blinking star, but through baseball travels and moving up the ladder, that star begins to flicker. — Wade Boggs

Let us hold fast to the iron rod. The Savior urged us to put our hand to the plow without looking back. In that spirit we are being asked to have humility and a deep and abiding faith in the Lord and to move forward-trusting in him, refusing to be diverted from our course, either by the ways of the world or the praise of the world. — Spencer W. Kimball

hear you're going to be on crutches for quite a while." "Yes, well - " "Abigail has already said she's moving back home to help you." "Oh," said Madeline. "Oh." She fingered the pink petals of the flowers. "Well, I'll talk to her about it. I'll be perfectly fine. She doesn't need to look after me." "No, but I think she wants to move back home," said Nathan. "She's looking for an excuse." Madeline and Ed looked at each other. Ed shrugged. "I always thought the novelty would wear off," said Nathan. "She missed her mum. We're not her real life." "Right." "So. I should get going," said Ed. "Could you stay for a moment, mate? — Liane Moriarty

She's life, and I'm death. Prescott Burlington-Smyth is everything I want to be. A storm moving out of a shit situation at the speed of light, not looking back to spare a glance at the casualties of her actions. How — L.J. Shen

I'd be ( ... ) lying there on my back with my clothes on and looking up at the ceiling and watching the cigarette smoke flow up slow and splash against the ceiling like the upside-down slow-motion moving picture of the ghost of a waterfall or like the pale uncertain spirit rising up out of your mouth on the last exhalation, the way the Egyptians figured it, to leave the horizontal tenement of clay in its ill-fitting pants and vest. — Robert Penn Warren

I felt myself trapped in line for a ride I was not nearly ready for, looking back but moving forward in the only direction I could go. — Elizabeth Berg

That was the only time, as I stood there, looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming across those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because this was Norfolk after all, and it was only a couple of weeks since I'd lost him. I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy, and he'd wave, maybe even call. The fantasy never got beyond that
I didn't let it
and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn't sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be. — Kazuo Ishiguro

For me, the stereoscopic imagery was a new game to play with. Surprisingly enough, it's also a return to tradition. I'm back with paper-looking puppets moving about in several layers of theatrical backgrounds. — Michel Ocelot

The thing is that it could never again feel natural to talk to her — John Green

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

VIEW FROM A HILL
I am not yet quite over it.
I am lying down on top of it.
Surveying behind me a wasteland
Of dried-up promise.
While the lights below twinkle
With dull mocking uncertainty.
There isn't much left to look forward to,
And the looking forward of the past has been belied. — John Tottenham

The people around me had gone on ahead long before, while my time and I hung back, struggling through the mud. I trudged along through each day in its turn, rarely looking up, eyes locked on the never-ending swamp that lay before me, planting my right foot, raising my left, planting my left foot, raising my right, never sure where I was, never sure I was headed in the right direction, knowing only that I had to keep moving, one step at a time. — Haruki Murakami

Well, your whole life is like a checkerboard and there's a sense that you get, especially looking back on it, that you begin to realize and gain awareness that there's something else moving all of these pieces around in your life, and that was really true for me right from the very beginning. — Wayne Dyer

A raging, glowering full moon had come up, was peering down over the side of the sky well above the patio.
That was the last thing she saw as she leaned for a moment, inert with fatigue, against the doorway of the room in which her child lay. Then she dragged herself in to topple headlong upon the bed and, already fast asleep, to circle her child with one protective arm, moving as if of its own instinct.
Not the meek, the pallid, gentle moon of home. This was the savage moon that had shone down on Montezuma and Cuauhtemoc, and came back looking for them now. The primitive moon that had once looked down on terraced heathen cities and human sacrifices. The moon of Anahuac. ("The Moon Of Montezuma") — Cornell Woolrich

The brain has an attentional mode called the "mind wandering mode" that was only recently identified. This is when thoughts move seamlessly from one to another, often to unrelated thoughts, without you controlling where they go. This brain state acts as a neural reset button, allowing us to come back to our work with a refreshed perspective. Different people find they enter this mode in different ways: reading, a walk in nature, looking at art, meditating, and napping. A 15-minute nap can produce the equivalent of a 10-point boost in IQ. — Daniel Levitin

Within minutes, the entire village was in the water, splashing about, falling over, getting up, moving steadily forwards towards the horizon; never looking back to shore ... "come back," he beseeched his wife: "nothing is happening. come back! — Salman Rushdie