Quotes & Sayings About Pasts

We're too often guilty of thinking that our parents arrived on this planet as fully functioning adults on the day that we were born. That they don't have pasts of their own prior to our birth. That the father is not also a son, that the mother is not also a child. My mother had a tough beginning, enduring things I know little about. And yet I more often discount her pain and overvalue mine. — Steven Rowley

Only when people got back to when the timequake hit did they stop being robots of their pasts. Only when free will kicked in could they stop running obstacle courses of their own construction. — Kurt Vonnegut

My one challenge with the support group that I'd become involved with on campus is that the people seem to spend as much time talking about their ill-begotten pasts as their promising futures. It's as if people are drawn to looking back. They can't move on until it all makes sense. Humbly submitted: It never does. — Carol Plum-Ucci

But science and experience reveal that with self-reflection and understanding, non-ideal patterns we've adopted from our own pasts can be transformed. Be patient with yourself and with your family members. With kindness and understanding, to yourself and to others, change can be nurtured and good things can emerge. — Daniel J. Siegel

You should not look at what the person used to do, rather you should
look at what kind of person they are today. The one who gets bogged
down about people's pasts, is just like Iblees who said to Allaah,
"You created me from fire and you created him from clay". — Ibn Taymiyyah

Advanced cultures are usually sophisticated enough, or have been sophisticated enough at some point in their pasts, to realize that foxes shouldn't be relied on to guard henhouses. — Jane Jacobs

Those people who think the same thoughts every day, most of them negative, have fallen into bad mental habits. Rather than focusing on all the good in their lives and thinking of ways to make things even better, they are captives of their pasts. — Robin S. Sharma

We don't escape our pasts, you know," Madd said. He sounded defeated. "Never. We can never escape what we are."

"Maybe not. But I think we can escape what other people try to make of us. We can decide our fate for ourselves. — Tali Spencer

We are all what our pasts have made us," Catarina said. "The accumulation of thousands of daily choices. We can change ourselves, but never erase what we've been. — Cassandra Clare

The pure reactionary is not a dreamer of abolished pasts, but a hunter of sacred shades on the eternal hills. — Nicolas Gomez Davila

Americans have no past, so they buy the pasts of others. — Jean-Luc Godard

Think of the most discouraging thing that you are currently carrying or the biggest project you can't seem to tackle. Forget about how it happened, forget about how you got there, just look at the clock, and before that number changes, do one little thing to make it better. After you do, enjoy your moment of victory, and then do it again. In less than the time it takes you to blink, the past will burden you no more. — Dan Pearce

To deny our pasts is to burn the bridge we must cross to self-understanding. Alan Christoffersen's diary — Richard Paul Evans

With tremendous clarity and wisdom, Daniel Tomasulo has crafted a memoir at once heartbreaking and uplifting. Layers of time and memory - childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle age - are so beautifully revealed here, a trenchant reminder that our pasts are alive inside of us. There are psychologists who can write, and writers who can psychologize, but rarely have the two met on the page with such moving, profound results. — Dani Shapiro

Our pasts often set our circumstances. — Katherine Russell

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories. — Siri Hustvedt

We are simply two good people with equally flawed pasts, looking for perfect futures.
And I think we've found it, in each other. — K.A. Tucker

Every single zom, every man, woman and child, no matter how decayed or how frightening they are, no matter how dangerous they are - they were all once real people. They had names, and lives, and personalities, and families. They had dreams and goals. They had pasts and they thought they had futures, but something came and took that away from them. — Jonathan Maberry

The fact that we all have broken pasts is something that I'm very attracted to, along with being able to turn your life around and do good with it. — Minka Kelly

We have a long road ahead of us because of our pasts. We both still struggle on a daily basis, and I can't swear to you that will ever stop. But it doesn't feel impossible when I'm with you. You make me smile and laugh. You make things right even when the world feels completely wrong. Sarah, it's easy to remember why I should open my eyes every morning when the first thing they see is you. — Anonymous

The unlikely group that resulted from the union of five diverse characters in their late twenties operated with surprising harmony. This cohesiveness could be attributed to two factors: 1) everyone's issues and embarrassing pasts were plainly disclosed prior to the gang's formation and 2) the clan had been expressly conceived as a male support group. — Zack Love

Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves. — Ted Chiang

Our pasts always haunt us. But sometimes the ghosts are friendly, and the memories they bring with them sweet as well as bitter. — Kat Howard

Somewhere in the distance, the synchronic circles of our pasts had tripped a domino, and the steady whirr had grown till it now drowned with the roar of contingency — Craig Johnson

Family is very important; it reminds you what your pasts were and not what you've become. — Abdulazeez Henry Musa

The uncreated and the dead exist solely in our actual and virtual pasts. — David Mitchell

Life isn't really linear. Although it's generally perceived that way. The stories we tell are woven like snakes around a divining rod. A center of time containing all that's ever been told and heard. Remembered and forgotten. Lost and found. Our pasts, presents and futures are unwound, stretched flat, cut into pieces and held up with human arms. — Thomas Lloyd Qualls

Two sides of the puzzle come together to form a union that seems protected in perfection and unscathed by life.
Here, together, we don't have pasts that scar us or baggage that weighs us down with burdens and regrets. Here, together, our flawed souls find solace in each other.
Here, together, we make sense. — S.L. Scott

According to the strange mathematics of the god of mutual affinity, the shadows that clouded their pasts when united became only half as dense instead of darker.

- The World And The Door — O. Henry

Austrians were allowed to paper over their pasts and portray themselves as unwilling participants. They felt sorry for themselves, and for the proud family names sullied with the taint of Nazi collaboration. The Cold War began in earnest, and the West was eager to hang on to Austria. A 1948 amnesty brought a premature end to Austrian de-Nazification. Austrians began to deny their jubilant welcome of Hitler and to claim that Austria had been "occupied" by Germany, like — Anne-Marie O'Connor

I've been a friend to people who may not have had perfect pasts. — Jeff Greene

No matter what storms come our way, we'll endure them. Together. Because our love is strong and unflappable. Love destroys demons and obliterates broken pasts. Love is ours - finally - and we fucking earned it. — K. Webster

When your're both finished trying to frighten each other away with the sordidness of your pasts, can you help me, please? — Melina Marchetta

Pretty soon ... do you realize there'll be so many additional childhoods and pasts with everybody writing about them everybody'll give up reading in despair-There'll be an Explosion of childhoods and pasts, they'll have to have a giant Brain print them out microscopically on film to be stored in a warehouse on Mars to give Heaven Seventy Kotis to catch up on all that reading- Seventy Million Million Kotis! - Whoopee! - Everything is free! — Jack Kerouac

Acheron always says that our scars are there to remind us of out pasts, of where we've been and what we've gone through. But that pain doesn't have to drive or determine our future. We can rise about it if we let ourselves. It's not easy, but nothing in life ever is. -Sundown — Sherrilyn Kenyon

[Writing about themselves] gives them wings, so that they can rise above the confounding maze of their lives and, from that perspective, begin to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and a way out. That's the funny thing about mazes; what's baffling on the ground begins to make sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself. — Wally Lamb

am a collection of the obsolete, a relic of the damned, of the lost and strayed. I am the waylaid pieces of history which sank out of sight in all of our pasts. — Frank Herbert

Full of intrigue, tangled pasts, and raw emotions, [Gambling On A Secret by Sara Walter Ellwood] is guaranteed to keep you turning pages from start to finish and then wishing for one more chapter! — Carolyn Brown

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.

Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of he body. 'I feel good here': the well-being under-expressed in the language it appears in like a fleeting glimmer is a spatial practice. — Michel De Certeau

Once your past no longer has the power to define you, your future is, quite literally, yours for the taking. Every single beautiful thing you could possibly want or imagine will be yours. — Dan Pearce

The books of our childhood offer a vivid door to our own pasts, and not necessarily for the stories we read there, but for the memories of where we were and who we were when we were reading them; to remember a book is to remember the child who read that book. — Lewis Buzbee

I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time. — H.P. Lovecraft

If we were all perfect in our pasts, then we'd have nothing to hope for in our futures — Jenny Oliver

All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them. — John Fowles

My mom used to say that's why we have memory. And the opposite of memory - hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can build off our pasts and make futures. — Isaac Marion

Our pasts might shape us, but they weren't the end sum of us. — Jeaniene Frost

All former counter-insurgency officers categorically denied having perpetrated torture during the Terror. In the case of at least one such research participant, anecdotal evidence from mutual contacts suggested otherwise. It is impossible to tell who, if any, of the former counter-insurgency officers featured in this chapter perpetrated torture during the Bheeshanaya. Eliciting confessions is not the aim of this book. My interest lies, instead, in exploring the ways in which 'perpetrators' of violence remember and reconstruct their disturbing pasts, and how they come to terms with it in the present. — Dhana Hughes

If you don't want your past to own you, try owning your past. — Dan Pearce

Our pasts so many times determine the value of what is happening today. Everybody is midway in their story. — Ron Carlson

We all have pasts and we all have futures. All we can do is choose to live in one or the other. It doesn't seem to me that there's much point living in the past. — Jayne Ann Krentz

The future is more beautiful than all the pasts. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Gentle Reminder: 1 Don't confuse protecting your heart with being too scared to try something new with someone else, there is a difference. A lot of us have given way too much power to our pasts. Not everyone who may want a chance is going to use that chance against you negatively. Yes, some folks may fool us, trick us and even hurt us but some is not all. Don't miss out on a good thing because your past is persuading you not to pursue your future. — Alexandra Elle

Why is it that so few "pretty people" without checkered pasts are used mightily in the Scriptures? Because the Bible is primarily about God's grace, not about human cleanliness. — Matt Chandler

Not in imagined futures, Or in remembered pasts, But only here and only now Will you find a peace that lasts. — Devdas Menon

The fire roared down upon us. It curled through our hair, then wrapped around our wrists and faces, trying to drag us apart. It seared across my skin, hotter than the Heart of Fire, and yet more painful was how it seared through my mind. The fire burned away my memories, taking back his name and mine, both of my pasts and all of my hopes, the sky and the sparrow and the world itself. I clung to somebody I did not know, could not imagine knowing, but I still knew beyond all doubt that he was mine.
We fell until we had been falling forever and always, and always would continue falling, because nothing existed outside this chaos of fire and shadow.
But I held on to him.
And he held on to me. — Rosamund Hodge

Keep your life in a positive perspective. We are not defined by our pasts — Ray J

In all memory there is a degree of fallenness; we are all exiles from our own pasts, just as, on looking up from a book, we discover anew our banishment from the bright worlds of imagination and fantasy. A cross-channel ferry, with its overfilled ashtrays and vomiting children, is as good a place as any to reflect on the angel who stands with a flaming sword in front of the gateway to all our yesterdays. — John Lanchester

Try to visualize all the streams of human interaction, of communication. All those linking streams flowing in and between people, through text, pictures, spoken words and TV commentaries, streams through shared memories, casual relations, witnessed events, touching pasts and futures, cause and effect. Try to see this immense latticework of lakes and flowing streams, see the size and awesome complexity of it. This huge rich environment. This waterway paradise of all information and identities and societies and selves. — Steven Hall

For some reason the past - any of our pasts - was solidly off-limits. They were like the creepy rabbits in Watership Down who won't answer any questions beginning with "Where. — Tana French

We are all affected by our pasts, but it is within our power not to let what we have done to dictate what we will do. — Kristin Cast

We all have pasts that haunt us, Mr. McLeod. — Ramona Flightner

To change the limitations of our personal pasts, our minds need a reason to change what we believe-and a good one at that. — Gregg Braden

What a strange joy it was to talk, to fish gleefully into the past and fling its fragments about us, with the unfailing aroma of pleasantness that pasts always seem to possess! — Anne Bosworth Greene

Comes to shove, they're forced to make choices neither are eager to make, and Jesse and Rowen have to face what their lives might look like without the other. Can two people with such tragic pasts and different presents expect a promising future together? Whatever the answer, they'll need a lot more than love to make it. All she wants to do is forget. Forget the memory of walking in on her boyfriend in the middle of, well, another girl. Forget how she had her entire life planned out. And forget about — Anonymous

We should kill our pasts with each passing day. Blot them out, so that they will not hurt. Each present day could thus be endured more easily, it would not be measured against what no longer exists. As things are, spectres mix with our lives so that there is neither pure memory nor pure life. They clash and try to strangle each other, continually — Mesa Selimovic

We all have our painful pasts we have to get through. — Valerie Bertinelli

Some pasts exist as a fog that rolls in and out of the present, formed not by air that condenses into mist but memories that condense into tiny doors that open to forgotten moments. Maybe you glance at a stranger on a crowded street who reminds you of a childhood friend or hear a song that was popular the first summer you fell in love, and in the space of that single beat of time you are flung backward to a who or when long past. And yet it is only for that one beat. Those tiny doors never remain open for long for most of us. They ensure our former times are kept as relics, and the dust upon them is wiped clean only occasionally — Billy Coffey

It's the pressing on toward the goal that is important, not simply trying to look perfect or be perfect. And it's also important to forget what is behind us, because we cannot change our pasts. We can, however, look forward and fix our eyes on Jesus as we listen to His direction. — Michelle Anthony

Food has powers. It picks us up from our lonely corners and sits us back down, together. It pulls us out of ourselves, to the kitchen, to the table, to the diner down the block. At the same time, it draws us inward. Food is the keeper of our memories, connecting us with our pasts and with our people. — Jessica Fechtor

What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely. — Colum McCann

Life just is and the gods have their plans for us. We're powerless against them. In the end, we are what our pasts have made us and we live the lives the gods have chosen for us.
-Syn — Sherrilyn Kenyon

I'm supposed to learn something. A lesson, like in some teenybopper show. I stare at the door and wait for Miley Cyrus to come barreling in, singing tunelessly about our pasts being the key to our futures. — Rachel Harris

We all have our pasts and baggage, Mimi. It's our decision whether they fuck with our future. — Katie Ashley

Bruce, we've been defined by our pasts. Everyone is, but I just think some souls can take more than others. It's not their fault if they can't.'

I thought of my mother and couldn't have agreed more - and couldn't have loved Jenn more for saying it. — Jake Remington

We are bound to our lives, to our pasts, to the laws of what we consider right or wrong, and suddenly, everything changes. We — Paulo Coelho

Some of my best friends here in New York have pasts I have a hard time reconciling with the people I'm close to now. But I wouldn't change them - or their pasts - for anything in the world. Their experiences are what made them the people they are today. — Derek Blasberg

It also reminds me that true power comes not from submission or gain, but from controlling my inner demons. Because our true enemies live within ourselves and feed from the lessons we failed to learn from our pasts. — J.C. Reed

If we say that monsters [people who do terrible evil] are beyond forgiving, we give them a power they should never have ... they are given the power to keep their evil alive in the hearts of those who suffered most. We give them power to condemn their victims to live forever with the hurting memory of their painful pasts. We give the monsters the last word. — Lewis B. Smedes

For better or worse, our pasts and experiences are what define us. But they don't have to rule us. In time, all hurts can be forgiven. It's only when you add to them that they can't. - Nero — Sherrilyn Kenyon

I don't think that trauma is an illusion; there is no question in my mind that circumstances beyond our control can shape and define us. But ultimately, we make choices about letting ourselves be defined by our pasts. — Christina Baker Kline

Was it really better for human beings to discover more of their pasts? And then more and more ... ? Or was it simply better to know as little of the past as possible and even to forget what small amount was remembered? — Elif Shafak

Some people are haunted by their pasts, but not my family. I mean, how can you be haunted by something that never really dies? — Brian K. Vaughan

Mirrors have three purposes. To show you who you are. To show you who you were. And to show you who you want to be. — Dan Pearce

Fantasy is, at its best, the purest access to storytelling that we have. It universalizes a tale, it evokes wonder and timeless narrative power, it touches upon inner journeys, it illuminates our collective and individual pasts, throws a focus beam on the present day, and presages the dangers and promises of the future. — Guy Gavriel Kay

I'm sorry. For all of us. Sorry for all the little ways the people who were supposed to love us most could hurt us so deeply, despite their shared heritage and blood, as thought their knowledge of our pasts gave them unlimited access to all the most tender places, the old wounds that could be so easily reopened with no more than a glance, a comment, a passing reminder of all the ways in which we failed to live up to their expectations. — Sarah Ockler

We obviously both have our pasts, but that's not important right now. I don't have to know every bad thing you ever did in your life to know that you're a good guy now. People change, grow up, get smarter, move on. In ten years I could be completely different, but I'll never be the person I was yesterday, or even this morning. I don't want to be. I want to try to be better with each second I'm alive." - SHEA — Michelle Warren

I am a collection of the obsolete, a relic of the damned, of the lost and strayed. I am the waylaid pieces of history which sank out of sight in all of our pasts. Such an accumulation of riffraff has never before been imagined. — Frank Herbert

All migrants leave their pasts behind, although some try to pack it into bundles and boxes-but on the journey something seeps out of the treasured mementoes and old photographs, until even their owners fail to recognize them, because it is the fate of migrants to be stripped of history, to stand naked amidst the scorn of strangers upon whom they see rich clothing, the brocades of continuity and the eyebrows of belonging.. — Salman Rushdie

There ought not be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts, one populated only by actions, the other only by theories. Every action is the bearer and expression of more or less theory-laden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorizing and every expression of belief is a politcal and moral action. — Alasdair McIntyre

Quantum physics might seem to undermine the idea that nature is governed by laws, but that is not the case. Instead it leads us to accept a new form of determinism: given the state of a system at some time, the laws of nature determine the probabilities of various futures and pasts rather than determining the future and past with certainty. — Stephen Hawking

Too many people have been analyzing their pasts, their childhoods, their memories, their parents, and realizing that it doesn't do anything-or that it doesn't do enough. — James Hillman

Dorcas belonged, as I now realize, to that vast group of women (which may, indeed, include all women) who betray us - and to that special type who betray us not for some present rival but for their own pasts. — Gene Wolfe

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others. — Julian Barnes

There are no inconsistencies in the Discworld books; ocassionally, however, there are alternate pasts. — Terry Pratchett

Our pasts shape us,Sam.None of us the person he or she used to be,it's true, but what we are still contains a great proportion of what we once were.Nothing,not even suffering the worst kind of tragedy,alters us completely.At core,we are set in stone. — James Lovegrove

Chevy Stevens is in top form. ALWAYS WATCHING is a tense and twisty exploration of dark memories, hidden pasts, and a place that seems like heaven but might be hell. This is a deep and exciting novel, as unsettling as it is gripping. — Lisa Unger

Everything we think we know, everything we think we see, everything we believe we feel, taste, smell, or hear, everything we "remember" (our pasts), everything we want to happen (our futures), everything that has ever existed or will ever exist, only exists right now. All of these things are nothing more than electric signals being passed through our brains and bodies, right now. It is all energy flowing through us right now. "The past" exists only in our minds. We are the ones who bring it into reality. We are the ones who bring it into the present. We are the ones who make it "real". — Dan Pearce

One with true creativity can erase their one past, and replace it with an infinite number of pasts, creating new possibilities for the future. — Lionel Suggs

We all have our pasts. I suspect we keep them nebulous not because we are hiding from our yesterdays but because we think we will cut more romantic figures if we roll our eyes and dispense delicate hints about beautiful women forever beyond our reaches. Those men whose stories I have uprooted are running from the law, not a tragic love affair. — Glen Cook