Past It Quotes & Sayings

You can't predict the future. It turns out that you can't predict the past either. Time moves in both directions - forward and backward - and what happens here and now changes them both. — Nicola Yoon

The past has no power over us. It doesn't matter how long we have had a negative pattern. The point of power is in the present moment. What a wonderful thing to realize! We can begin to be free in this moment! — Louise L. Hay

By extrapolating a little from Freud, it becomes possible to think of nationalism as a kind of narcissism. A nationalist takes the neutral facts about a people - their language, habitat, culture, tradition and history- and turns these facts into a narrative, whose purpose is to illuminate the self-consciousness of a group, to enable them to think of themselves as a nation with a claim to self-determination. A nationalist, in other words, takes "minor differences"- indifferent in themselves- and transforms them into major differences. For this purpose, traditions are invented, a glorious past is gilded and refurbished for public consumption, and a people who might not have thought of themselves as a people at all suddenly begin to dream of themselves as a nation. — Michael Ignatieff

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

It has always seemed to me that any man is a better man for being a hunter. This sport confers a certain constant alertness, and develops a certain ruggedness of character ... Moreover, it allies us to the pioneer past. In a deep sense, this great land of ours was won for us by hunters. — Archibald Rutledge

Every city is a ghost.
New buildings rise upon the bones of the old so that each shiny steel bean, each tower of brick carries within it the memories of what has gone before, an architectural haunting. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of these former incarnations in the awkward angle of a street or filigreed gate, an old oak door peeking out from a new facade, the plaque commemorating the spot that was once a battleground, which became a saloon and is now a park. — Libba Bray

It's only by studying the mistakes of the past," Lucien said mildly, "that we can even have a future — Meg Cabot

I also learned to play Fruit Ninja on an iPad. It is quite hypnotic, and I hope one day to get past 100 points. I remembered that David Cameron admits to being an addict. I wonder if it helps him in his work. 'Great, just destroyed a pineapple! Reminds me, shall we send those grenades to the Syrian rebels?' — Simon Hoggart

Still, we will let all this be a thing of the past, though it hurts us, and beat down by constraint the anger that rises inside us.
Now I am making an end of my anger. It does not become me, unrelentingly to rage on — Homer

He felt a strange urge, right then, just to put his head down and walk past, off into the night and never look back. Then he wouldn't have to be the Bloody-Nine again... He could've gone far away, and started new, and been whoever he wanted. But he'd tried that once already, and it had done him no good. The past was always right behind him, breathing on his neck. It was time to turn around and face it. — Joe Abercrombie

Here in Turin you can write because past and future have greater prominence than the present, the force of past history and the anticipation of the future give a concreteness and sense to the discrete, ordered images of today. Turin is a city which entices the reader towards vigour, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way toward madness. — Italo Calvino

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

The significant difference between Proust and Faulkner, for Sartre, is that where Proust discovers salvation in time, in the recovery of time past, for Faulkner time is never lost, however much he may want, like a mystic, to forget time. Both writers emphasize the transitoriness of emotion, of the condition of love or misery, or whatever passes because it is transitory in time. "Proust really should have employed a technique like Faulkner's," Sartre legislates, "that was the logical outcome of his metaphysic. Faulkner, however, is a lost man, and because he knows that he is lost he risks pushing his thoughts to its conclusion. Proust is a classicist and a Frenchman; and the French lose themselves with caution and always end by finding themselves. — John McCormick

It is not because I do not love my adopted land - it is the natural feeling of one far from home, who remembers those happy, carefree days when life flowed at full tide, without responsibility, flashing past one like the drama in a fascinating story of adventure and romance. — Erich Von Stroheim

Perspective is a kind of mental sunblock that, provided we apply it properly, prevents us from getting burned by past mistakes. — Steve Leveen

Wishing for the impossible in the future is a good exercise, I think, especially for children; wishing for it in the past is surely the emptiest and saddest of occupations. — Edgar Pangborn

The past is what nourishes and sustains us. It is like going to work on a good breakfast. — Robert Stephen Parry

I am convinced that being fully committed to the moment, without any worries about the past or projections into the future, is the best attribute a closer can have. You wonder why the shelf life of so many short relievers is, well, so short? Why guys can be unhittable for a year or two and then disappear? It's because it takes a ton of concentration, and self-belief, to stay in the moment in this way and not let the highs and lows mess with your psyche. — Mariano Rivera

A world of "if"s, but it would make no difference. If I could go back in time ... but I couldn't. The past was behind me. The best thing now would be to stop looking over my shoulder. It was time to forget the past and look to the present and future. — Darren Shan

The past was a consumable, subject to the national preference for familiar products. And history, in America, is a dish best served plain. The first course could include a dollop of Italian in 1492, but not Spanish spice or French sauce or too much Indian corn. Nothing too filling or fancy ahead of the turkey and pumpkin pie, just the way Grandma used to cook it. — Tony Horwitz

But for the love of piss, make some sort of decision. If you don't want to eat babies and nail bloodbags to walls, that's your choice. What Sarren did or made you do in the past has nothing to do with it now. You're a vampire. Do whatever the hell you want. — Julie Kagawa

This is not pessimism but rather casting a cold eye on things. It is only one man's story, and I think that things will go better, but difficulties exist and nothing is served by hiding them under a poetic veil or under a lyricism of the past. I am against slogans. — Chinua Achebe

It occurred to her, sadly, and not for the first time, that as you grew older you became busier, and time went faster and faster, the months pushing each other rudely out of the way, and the years slipping off the calendar and into the past. Once, there had been time. Time to stand, or sit, and just look at daffodils. Or to abandon housekeeping, on the spur of the moment, walk out of the back door and up the hill, into the lark-song emptiness of a summer morning. — Rosamunde Pilcher

I'm not trying to hide my past," he said in earnest. "I've learned a lot from it. It's made me who I am today, and I'm proud of who I've become. — Amber Lynn Natusch

And I mouth into the phone, I love you, in case some of her cells pick up on the vibrations and it serves me well in the next life. If there is one. If there is a next life, I hope it's in the past; I don't think the future will be any more handleable. — Ned Vizzini

Freud said that life is all about being able to love and to work. And I think it is about those things. But it's also about play. Play can bring back the past, but even if it doesn't, play is now; play is fun. More than ever, I have the feeling that all of what we do that counts is just love and work and play. — Alan Alda

That's our plan? We're going to walk fifty kilometers, right past the Germans, to a poultry collective that maybe didn't get burned down, grab a dozen eggs, and come home?"
"Well, anything would sound ridiculous if said it in that tone of voice."
"Tone of ... I'm asking you a question! — David Benioff

It is the fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seems to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers. — G.K. Chesterton

Don't waste time on what's not important. Don't get sucked into the drama. Get on with it: don't dwell on the past. Be a big person; be generous of spirit; be the person you'd admire. — Allegra Huston

If there is anything certain in life, it is this. Time doesn't always heal. Not really. I know they say it does, but that is not true. What time does is to trick you into believing that you have healed, that the hurt of a great loss has lessened. But a single word, a note of a song, a fragrance, a knife point of dawn light across an empty room, any one of these things will take you back to that one moment you have never truly forgotten. These small things are the agents of memory. They are the sharp needle points piercing the living fabric of your life.

Life, my children, isn't linear where the heart is concerned. It is filled with invisible threads that reach out from your past and into your future. These threads connect every second we have lived and breathed. As your own lives move forward and as the decades pass, the more of these threads are cast. Your task is to weave them into a tapestry, one that tells the story of the time we shared. — Stephen Lee

The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory. — Michel Faber

The past is an obdurate stranger that puts as many marks on us as we attempt to impose on it. — Joanne Harris

Most of us have fond memories of food from our childhood. Whether it was our mom's homemade lasagna or a memorable chocolate birthday cake, food has a way of transporting us back to the past. — Homaro Cantu

Security analysis does not assume that a past average will be repeated, but only that it supplies a rough index to what may be expected of the future. A trend, however, cannot be used as a rough index; it represents a definite prediction of either better or poorer results, and it must be either right or wrong. — Benjamin Graham

The problem with middle age, at least when it comes to modeling, is you seldom see a model who is past 27, 28. If they use anyone older, then it becomes automatically a 'personality' story. — Isabella Rossellini

The past is a presence between us. In all my mother does and says, the past continually discloses itself in the smallest ways. She sees it directly; I see its shadow. Still, it pulses in my fingertips, feeds on my consciousness. It is a backdrop for each act, each drama of our lives. I have absorbed a sense of what she has suffered, what she has lost, even what her mother endured and handed down. It is my emotional gene map. — Fern Schumer Chapman

I touched the moon last night;
a golden glow beyond my grasp.
Eons before me it rested there.
It will remain when I am dust.
My hand now glows from the embrace.
Voices echo through nights past,
and with the glow, caress my face.
My finger faints from what will last.
Alone I am; alone secure;
the moon will last when I am gone.
A Master set it in its' place,
to move the tide, refresh the dawn.
Unnumbered eyes have felt its rest;
have looked upon reflected light.
My heart is moved away from pain;
I touched the moon last night. — Craig Froman

Where would we be without it, memory? Well, it'll never die here. Never in this country. We feed it too well. — Josephine Hart

This Obamacare thing really scares me. The United States government / politicians are trying to turn the American people into a brand X "One size fits all" country. The past ten years has been very grim for Americans. Our current state is very grim. Our future is even more grim than ever. I used to tell people that it will get worse before it gets better. Now, I just say it will get worse. — Carroll Bryant

And indeed, it cannot be denied that the most successful practitioners of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human system, so that when eleven strikes, all the rest chime in unison, and the present is neither a violent disruption nor completely forgotten in the past. — Virginia Woolf

Mutual fund managers are trapped in this rather deadly vicious circle: the more successful they are, the more money flows into their mutual fund. Then, it is more difficult for them to beat the market averages or even to match their own past performance. — Ron Chernow

You are not to take it, if you please, as the saying of an ignorant man, when I express my opinion that such a book as ROBINSON CRUSOE never was written, and never will be written again. I have tried that book for years - generally in combination with a pipe of tobacco - and I have found it my friend in need in all the necessities of this mortal life. When my spirits are bad - ROBINSON CRUSOE. When I want advice - ROBINSON CRUSOE. In past times when my wife plagued me; in present times when I have had a drop too much - ROBINSON CRUSOE. I have worn out six stout ROBINSON CRUSOES with hard work in my service. On my lady's last birthday she gave me a seventh. I took a drop too much on the strength of it; and ROBINSON CRUSOE put me right again. Price four shillings and sixpence, bound in blue, with a picture into the bargain.
— Wilkie Collins

Because sometimes in life, you just have to stand there and do nothing. Overwhelmed by all the versions of ourselves that exist in our minds - who we want to be, who we should be, who we're not, and who we are - it's a jungle that can ensnare your feet and confuse your eyes. But sometimes if you stand still, all those things will snap back into place like a rubber band. And if you can get past the sting, you can keep moving, not quite whole, but held together for the moment. — Cora Carmack

As his drove past the silhouettes of maple trees, stefan cringed from the memory that sprang up suddenly. He would not think that, he would not let himself... but the images were already unreeling before him. It was as if the journal had fallen open and he could do no more than stare helplessly at the page while the story played itself out in his mind... — L.J.Smith

If you read on and unlock the secrets of time travel, you could be responsible for the dissolution of every puppy that ever exists - past, present and future. And we'll tell everyone it was you. — Phil Hornshaw

There will be ribbons in a range of colors with placings noted and records kept. Ribbons aren't worth much more than that; they're only a symbol. It's your partnership that mattered. That the two of you spent weekends challenging yourselves to improve, always competing against your last show, and balancing winning and losing into a place of faith and trust. That the two of you built a special relationship that made a difference, if not in the huge world, certainly in your own hearts. You persevered through joy and pain, thrill and dread, and in the end, there was a place that the two of your shared. Ribbons say it was worth celebrating. In a world where horses struggle, suffer, and die for the whims of humans, it says that you saw past the surface and shared breath and heart with another soul. You lifted your eyes higher. — Anna Blake

I think we like to romanticise about past eras, and for sure there have been great ones (like the 1820s maybe, or the 1530s) but I don't think London has ever been more culturally and sartorially rich as it is now. — Patrick Grant

We are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, and no amount of education gleaned from our propensity for self-destruction and misguided thinking ever teaches us anything. Not anything that we remember for more than a generation or two.
I think maybe we learn a few things each time that we don't forget. A few things that stick with us. It's just hard to pass those things on to those who come after us because if they didn't live through it, they don't view it the same way we do. If you don't experience something firsthand, it's a lot harder to accept. Terry Brooks, Bearers of the Black Staff, p 89 — Terry Brooks

HE: History has no smell.
ME: Is that why we are nostalgic for it?
HE: Breathe in, breathe out. The past doesn't stink like the present. — Jeanette Winterson

Each morning we must hold out the chalice of our being to receive, to carry, and give back. It must be held out empty - for the past must only be reflected in its polish, its shape, its capacity. — Dag Hammarskjold

It has been long considered possible to explain the more ancient revolutions on ... the Earth surface by means of these still existing causes; in the same manner as it is found easy to explain past events in political history, by an acquaintance with the passions and intrigues of the present day. But we shall presently see that unfortunately this is not the case in physical history:-the thread of operation is here broken, the march of nature is changed, and none of the agents that she now employs were sufficient for the production of her ancient works. — Georges Cuvier

I'm amazed by just constantly - there's not a week that goes past where there's not someone in Ulan Bator or Rio De Janeiro suddenly says, 'Ooh, 'Downton' started this week.' You completely forget it's staggered across the world. — Dan Stevens

I've done a lot of bad things in the past, and that troubles me. It is often before I could say I was a self. — Malcolm Morley

Being with my family and loved ones makes me feel vulnerable. Speaking my truth and then being that in action. Leaving my comfort zone but knowing that risk is going to create something beautiful. I believe I have come to good terms with my vulnerability. I welcome it now, where I didn't in the past. — Dash Mihok

There are times, like after a long day of work, when the thought of an easy drive-through is enticing. But then I remember how crappy I felt when I ate fast food in the past, and it inspires me to head to the grocery store or my local farmer's market and whip up an easy but healthier option. — Alison Sweeney

If you want to know what it means to be happy, look at a flower, a bird, a child; they are perfect images of the kingdom. For they live from moment to moment in the eternal now with no past and no future. — Anthony De Mello

For it is the business and duty of historians to be exact, truthful, and wholly free from passion, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor love, should make them swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, storehouse of deeds, witness for the past, example and counsel for the present, and warning for the future. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

It is not settled happiness but momentary joy that glorifies the past. — C.S. Lewis

The enchantments of the past must always become the disenchantments of the future. But memory, a preservative, may intervene. The embalmer of original enchantments, it is the only human faculty that can outwit the advance of chronological time. Art, the embalmer of memory, is the only human vocation in which the time regained by memory can be permanently fixed. — Howard Moss

Exploration! Exploring the past! We students in the camps seminar considered ourselves radical explorers. We tore open the windows and let in the air, the wind that finally whirled away the dust that society had permitted to settle over the horrors of the past. We made sure people could see. And we placed no reliance on legal scholarship. It was evident to us that there had to be convictions. It was just as evident as conviction of this or that camp guard or police enforcer was only the prelude. The generation that had been served by the guards and enforcers, or had done nothing to stop them, or had not banished them from its midst as it could have done after 1945, was in the dock, and we explored it, subjected it to trial by daylight, and condemned it to shame. — Bernhard Schlink

I look down past the stars to a terrifying darkness. I seem to recognize the place, but it's impossible. "Accident," I whisper. I will fall. I seem to desire the fall, and though I fight it with all my will I know in advance I can't win. Standing baffled, quaking with fear, three feet from the edge of a nightmare cliff, I find myself, incredibly, moving towards it. I look down, down, into bottomless blackness, feeling the dark power moving in me like an ocean current, some monster inside me, deep sea wonder, dread night monarch astir in his cave, moving me slowly to my voluntary tumble into death. — John Gardner

Memories are weird. They never really leave you alone, no matter how much you try, and the funny part is--the more you try, the more they haunt you. The more you want to run away, the faster they seem to catch up, and then there comes a time when you are convinced that you have finally managed to leave them behind and move on. You rejoice. You celebrate. You have exorcised the ghosts of the past--you feel liberated, UNTIL one fine day, some old memory creeps up slowly from behind and taps you on your shoulder just to say "Hi. How's it going so far?". That is when everything comes rushing in, and you realize that maybe, just maybe, it had never really gone away. — Priyanka Naik

One of the questions I face when working on a book about a historical event is whether I should visit the actual place that I'm writing about. No matter how scrupulously maintained a historic house or battlefield may be, it is nothing like it was in the long-ago past. — Nathaniel Philbrick

In the expectant quiet, there were only the usual sounds of the night. Wind in the big trees out past the school wall, starting to rise as the sky darkened, Crickets beginning to chirp. Then Sabriel heard it
the massed grinding of Dead joints, no longer joined by gristle; the padding of Dead feet, bones like hobnails clicking through necrotic flesh. — Garth Nix

Make-believe colors the past with innocent distortion, and it swirls ahead of us in a thousand ways - in science, in politics, in every bold intention. — Shirley Temple

My God, he whispered. What have I done to her? He thought, humbled. The spell was broken, but it wasn't sealed, and her soul was bare to him, the scars of her tragic past and her triumphs over pain and her aching need to find her place. He just wanted to hold her to him and tell her it would be okay, that she had survived and was beautiful. — Kim Harrison

A city whose living immediacy is so urgent that when I am in it I lose all sense of the past. — Kenneth Tynan

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

Life, as he conceived of it, was a long decline from a glorious past, and if a reader approaches a newspaper in that spirit, he can find much to confirm him in his belief, particularly if he has never examined any short period of the past in day-to-day detail. — Robertson Davies

Diamonds are held under tons and tons of pressure, extremely high temperatures of fire and shuffled under shifting of tectonic plates, for a long, long time! Yet when they come out from there and are put on display for their beauty; does anybody stop to evaluate the diamond based upon all the shit it's been through and say "Remember that disgusting hole it used to be in? I bet it was hell in there!" No, people don't remember where a diamond has come from; they just see the beauty of it now. But it wouldn't have become so beautiful, you know, if not for all of that! So why should we look at other people, or at ourselves and evaluate them/ourselves based upon their/our pasts? Shouldn't we forget that? And only see the beauty that is in front of our eyes? Whatever it was, it made you beautiful! And that is what matters! — C. JoyBell C.

So Captain Jack's come a-courtin'." Her hands stilled on the basket. "Who?" "The tall Shawnee who come by your cabin." The tall one. Lael felt a small surge of triumph at learning his name. Captain Jack. Oddly, she felt no embarrassment. Lifting her shoulders in a slight shrug, she continued pulling the vines into a tight circle. "He come by, but I don't know why." "Best take a long look in the mirror, then." Lael's eyes roamed the dark walls. Ma Horn didn't own one. "Beads and a blanket, was it?" She nodded and looked back down. "I still can't figure out why some Shawnee would pay any mind to a white girl like me." Ma Horn chuckled, her face alight in the dimness. "Why, Captain Jack's as white as you are." "What?" she blurted, eyes wide as a child's. Ma Horn's smile turned sober. "He's no Indian, Shawnee or otherwise, so your pa says. He was took as a child from some-wheres in North Carolina. All he can remember of his past life is his white name - Jack. — Laura Frantz

Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead. . . . — Italo Calvino

The forty days of the soul begin on the morning after death. That first night, before its forty days begin, the soul lies still against sweated-on pillows and watches the living fold the hands and close the eyes, choke the room with smoke and silence to keep the new soul from the doors and the windows and the cracks in the floor so that it does not run out of the house like a river. The living know that, at daybreak, the soul will leave them and make its way to the places of its past ... and sometimes this journey will carry it so far for so long that it will forget to come back. — Tea Obreht

Gathering her courage, she swallowed past the lump in her throat and held his gaze. It wasn't how she'd envisioned telling him, but she couldn't let him go without saying the words. "I'm falling in love with you."
The smile died, his amused expression dissolving into shock. "What?"
"Yeah. So you have to come back so I can finish the job."
A jumble of emotions swirled in the blue depths of his eyes as he stared at her. Then he broke into a wide smile and brought a hand up to cradle her cheek. "I'm coming back, sweetheart. I wouldn't miss that chance for the world. — Kaylea Cross

...Americans didn't stick to cities, which makes us different from the people in other industrialized countries. We no sooner arrived in town, turning those towns into great mid-century metropolises, than we decided to take off for the green world beyond, so that by the 1970 Census, we had become the first suburban nation in the history of the world. And Detroit led the way, with a population curve up and down just like everywhere else, but with its urban decline a lot steeper over the past sixty years - so typical a place that it only looks like an exception. — Jerry Herron

Still, past assholes could make a person feel skittish. You had to be careful. It could all suddenly be different than you thought it was. A big possible mistake could be hidden anywhere, ready to blow up everything, same as stepping on a land mine. — Deb Caletti

When the past comes knocking, don't answer. It has nothing new to tell you. — Auliq Ice

The more we talk about the past, the less we heal from it. — Marshall B. Rosenberg

Love has a way of making us stupid, Will Henry. It blinds us to certain blatant realities, in this case the spectacularly high mortality rate among monstrumologists. Rarely do we live past forty - my father and von Helrung being the exceptions. — Rick Yancey

We cannot erase the past, but we can accept it as history. — Gary Chapman

It is past all question, and agreed on by all sides, that no religion will save a man who is not serious, sincere, and diligent in it. If thou be of the truest religion in the world, and are not true thyself to that religion, the religion is good, but it is none of thine. — Richard Baxter

History gives us a kind of chart, and we dare not surrender even a small rushlight in the darkness. The hasty reformer who does not remember the past will find himself condemned to repeat it. — John Buchan

In the early '90s, I was hired to write educational dramas about HIV and AIDS in the shantytowns. I did that for two and a half years, and then I was hired on other films. When 'Tsotsi' presented itself, I thought, 'This is not a world I grew up in, but I've spent a great deal of time writing about it and researching it in my past.' — Gavin Hood

To me, living in the present means being aware of your conscious choice to focus on the past, present or future - it is not necessarily having to focus on the present. — Bo Bennett

The sorrow of war inside a soldier's heart was in a strange way similar to the sorrow of love. It was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense sadness of a world at dusk. It was a daness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past. The sorrow of the battlefield could not normally be pinpointed to one particular event, or even one person. If you focused on any one event it would soon become a tearing pain. — Bao Ninh

The Greatest Generation?
They tell me I am a member of the greatest generation. That's because I saw combat duty as a bombardier in World War 11. But I refuse to celebrate "the greatest generation" because in so doing we are celebrating courage and sacrifice in the cause of war. And we are miseducating the young to believe that military heroism is the noblest form of heroism, when it should be remembered only as the tragic accompaniment of horrendous policies driven by power and profit. The current infatuation with World War 11 prepares us
innocently on the part of some, deliberately on the part of others
for more war, more military adventures, more attempts to emulate the military heroes of the past. — Howard Zinn

I think it's easy to hold on to this romantic hope that communities such as Niaqornat won't change, because we're in this world where progress is unstoppable, and they're a link to some idealised past. — Sarah Gavron

Living in the moment works sometimes, but when alone, it clouds over your memories and dreams, and those are what I need to survive. — D.S. Mixell

The bodybuilding world has lost one of its greatest legends. I had a chance to speak with Steve Michalik a year ago at The Upper State Bodybuilding competition. We laughed and shared our personal opinions about bodybuilding [today's scene and how it was in the past]. Steve, we'll miss you. R.I.P. — Lee Haney

He was walking through the desert, over burning sands, past bones whitening in the sun. He had never been so thirsty. When he swallowed, his mouth felt as if it were coated with sand, his throat lined with knives. — Cassandra Clare

Anything could happen here and who would know? It was a new place to me, but timeless in its own right. Regn had never stood here. All these years since and we'd been so close to 'this' obscurity. Its hidden proximity is what disquieted. — Wheston Chancellor Grove

Everyone has a past, but that's just it
it's in the past. You can learn from it, but you can't change it. — Nicholas Sparks

This past Thanksgiving, my father was at the farm, and I had all 11 dogs in the house with a father who never allowed dogs in the house. And he got up to leave the table and came back and Solomon was in his chair. And he says, "This dog is in my chair." And I said, "It's the other way around, you're sitting in his chair." — Oprah Winfrey

A scar signifies past pain, a wound that did not heal as it ought. But it testifies, too, to survival ... (Here be Dragons) — Sharon Kay Penman

And that survey is the one we all go back to. When you find one of their original corners, it is like a handshake with the past. — Andro Linklater

The gist of the matter is this: Every impression that comes in from without, be it a sentence which we hear, an object of vision, or an effluvium which assails our nose, no sooner enters our consciousness than it is drafted off in some determinate direction or other, making connection with the other materials already there, and finally producing what we call our reaction. The particular connections it strikes into are determined by our past experiences and the 'associations' of the present sort of impression with them. — William James

Chasing your tale? Sometimes we relive past accomplishments, failures and or past relationships to the point of exhaustion. When we do this, I liken it to a dog chasing its tail, just spinning round and round and going nowhere fast. Constantly chasing our own tales has the same effect on us. It leaves us in a state of dizzying immobility. When we wrap our arms so firmly around our past we leave little room to embrace our present future and that, my friends, is a sad tale to tell. ~Jason Versey — Jason Versey

Not the first time. I didn't think my heart could stand it. But the airplane is a wonderful thing. You are still in one place when you arrive at the other. The airplane is faster than the heart. You arrive quickly and you leave quickly. You don't grieve too much. And there is something else about the airplane. You can go back many times to the same place. And something strange happens if you go back often enough. You stop grieving for the past. You see that the past is something in your mind alone, that it doesn't exist in real life. You trample on the past, you crush it. In the beginning it is like trampling on a garden. In the end you are just walking on ground. That is the way we have to learn to live now. The past is here." He touched his heart. "It isn't there." And he pointed at the dusty road. I — V.S. Naipaul

In our day, we thought that the bards would sing of us for generations to come, but we did not believe it. But in fact Arthur now occupies a higher throne than he ever did when he was alive. The fragments of all our lives have been put together to form legend. Camelot has become the nursery of Britain: the glorious past that never was and always will be. — Clara Winter

Magic can make things happen before you do it. It can make things have happened. — Jo Walton