Someone In Your Past Quotes & Sayings

The longer you've known someone- the more history there is between you- the longer it will take to establish in their mind that you have truly changed. Remember, forgiveness is an altogether different thing from trust or respect. Forgiveness is about the past. Trust and respect are about the future. Forgiveness will be in the hands of others and cna be given to you, but trust and respect are in your own hands and must be earned. — Andy Andrews

Life has no victims. There are no victims in this life.
No one has the right to point fingers at his/her past and blame it for what he/she is today. We do not have the right to point our finger at someone else and blame that person for how we treat others, today.
Don't hide in the corner, pointing fingers at your past. Don't sit under the table, talking about someone who has hurt you. Instead, stand up and face your past! Face your fears! Face your pain! And stomach it all! You may have to do so kicking and screaming and throwing fits and crying- but by all means- face it!
This life makes no room for cowards. — C. JoyBell C.

Love is an afternoon of fishing when I'd sooner be at the ballet.
Love is eating burnt toast and lumpy graving with a big smile.
Love is hearing the words 'You're beautiful' as I fail to squeeze into my fat jeans.
Love is refusing to bring up the past, even if doing so would be a slam dunk to prove your point.
Love is your hand wiping away my tears, trying to erase streaks of mascara.
Love is the warm hug that extinguishes an argument.
Love is a humbly-uttered apology, even if not at fault.
Love is easy to recognize but so hard to define; however, I think it boils down to this ...
Love is caring so much about the feelings of someone else, you sacrifice whatever it takes to help him or her feel better.
In other words, love is my heart being sensitive to yours. — Richelle E. Goodrich

If you haven't said 'I love you' to someone today, do it. You won't always be happy, but you should try to be. Don't be too afraid of germs. Those people have no fun. Remember to look around sometimes. You might see something you haven't seen before or at the very least avoid being hit by a flying object. Speaking of flying objects, don't spend your life looking for extraterrestrial life, unless you work for NASA. Remember that you always have to cooperate with someone. Life is an endless negotiation. Play fair. Stay out of jail. Don't live in the past. Eat breakfast. It really is the most important meal of the day. Try to make new friends, even when you think you're too old to do that ... And finally, remember this 'Yes' is always a better work than 'no'. Unless, of course, someone has just asked you to commit a felony. — Lisa Lutz

I want everyone that has been abused by someone in their childhood to know that you can get past it. Having DID is not the end of the world; it's the beginning of your new life. DID allows the victim of exceptional abuse the ability to "forget" the abuse and continue living. Without it, I may have gone crazy as a teen and spent my life in a as a teen and spent my life in a psychiatric hospital. — Dauna Cole

I write about how I was attracted to stripping because I didn't feel comfortable with my body, for instance, but there could be plenty of not-so-good reasons why I chose to go into journalism, too. Maybe someone had a trauma in childhood and it led them to become a nurse, or a lawyer, but because people stigmatize sex work they try to find a traumatic moment in your past and say, "There!" — Craig Seymour

Pritkin gave me a little shake and I eyed him without favor. The only other occasions when I had been dragged back in time, the trip had been triggered by proximity to a person whose past was being threatened.
I have to tell you," I said frankly, "if someone is trying to mess with your conception or something, I'm not feeling a pressing need to intervene. — Karen Chance

Have you ever met someone for the first time, but in your heart you feel as if you've met them before? — JoAnne Kenrick

I Don't Even Like Him - How Can I Pray for Him? Have you ever been so mad at your husband that the last thing you wanted to do was pray for him? So have I. It's hard to pray for someone when you're angry or he's hurt you. But that's exactly what God wants us to do. If He asks us to pray for our enemies, how much more should we be praying for the person with whom we have become one and are supposed to love? But how do we get past the unforgiveness and critical attitude? The first thing to do is be completely honest with God. In order to break down the walls in our hearts and smash the barriers that stop communication, we have to be totally up-front with the Lord about our feelings. We don't have to "pretty it up" for Him. He already knows the truth. He just wants to see if we're willing to admit it and confess it as disobedience to His ways. If so, He — Stormie O'martian

Thinking about the way you remembered your past. What you remembered, she said, was a string of events and years stretching back from the point where you now found yourself. In other words, a line of time. This might be coloured differently, depending upon what had happened to you. For example, if you had lost someone then it would be black. Other spots might be lighter. On some sections of the line time would have passed quickly, on other sections more slowly. But, for a long way back, it would still be a line. — Peter Hoeg

Caring for someone is scary [ ... ] But you can't fear dictate your life [ ... ] Don't live life hiding behind your past, live right now. When you find someone you want to spend forever with, you don't let them go, whether forever turns out to be a day or a year or a hundred years — Nicole Williams

Pops gave him a cool stare that settled Tom down - a thing not always easy to do. "Son, do you know what history is?"
"Uh ... stuff that happened in the past?"
"Nope," he said, trying on his canvas change-belt. "History is the collective and ancestral shit of the human race, a great big and ever growing pile of crap. Right now, we're standin at the top of it, but pretty soon we'll be buried under the doodoo of generations yet to come. That's why your folks' clothes look so funny in old photographs, to name but a single example. And, as someone who's destined to buried beneath the shit of your children and grandchildren, I think you should be just a leetle more forgiving. — Stephen King

When someone asks you where you come from, the answer is your mother...When your mother's gone, you've lost your past. It's so much more than love. Even when there's no love, it's so much more than anything else in your life. I did love my mother, but I didn't know how much until she was gone. — Anna Quindlen

the past, like the future, is dark. There is so much we don't know, and to write truthfully about a life, your own or your mother's, or a celebrated figure's, an event, a crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowing. They tell us that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries, starting with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the absence of exact information. Often — Rebecca Solnit

Use the information you've been given as an individual, but NEVER let what you've heard or read or experienced in the past prevent you from answering the call on your life.

You are responsible for your life. That includes the voice inside you and everything it calls you to do. Don't ignore that voice to follow rules that don't fit. When a jacket doesn't fit anymore, it's time to donate it. Same principle applies for rules which no longer serve you.

You don't have to curse the rules or condemn them. In fact, there might be someone else who would benefit from them at the exact moment you no longer need them.

Just step into all that you can be and all that you can do. — Stephen Lovegrove

The first way not to shake hands is executed by receiving someone's hand in yours and proceeding to squeeze it tightly, hurting the other party as if they were responsible for a past death in your family, or your adoption as a child. — Wes Locher

But I've learned over the past year what it really means to be able to miss someone. In order to miss someone, that means you were privileged enough to have them in your life to begin with. — Colleen Hoover

The man walked past me and stopped, observing the blood running down my neck.
"Your injury. Let us tend to it." He looked out through the open doorway and silently gestured to someone out there. "Our world," he said, "is far more advanced than yours. For reasons you'll understand shortly."
A thin, bony, naked woman entered the room, carrying two small, white kittens. She sat one of the fluffy cats in my lap and stuffed the other down my shirt. She turned and left.
"There," said the large man. "The kittens will make your sad go away. — David Wong

What would you do if someone breaks your heart and just when you are set to lose yourself in that abyss of emotions and feelings that you no longer understand, when you are numbed by the pain and life seems to be whizzing past you in fast forward , at this time that person comes back to heal you, only to break your heart all over again. Would you let her touch you one more time, to heal you to break you for the third time? No? And what if that person is someone you'd loved more than life, if she had changed the way you lived , would you hold back if she stood in front of you with her arms outstretched? — Atul Randev

With the persistence of data, there is, too, the persistence of people. If you friend someone as a ten-year-old, it takes positive action to unfriend that person. In principle, everyone wants to stay in touch with the people they grew up with but social networking makes the idea of "people from one's past" close to an anachronism. Corbin reaches for a way to express his discomfort. he says "For the first time, people will stay your friends. It makes it harder to let go of your life and move on." Sanjay, sixteen, who wonders if he will be "writing on my friends' walls when I'm a grown-up," sums up his misgivings: "For the first time people can stay in touch with people all of their lives. But it used to be good that people could leave their high school friends behind and take on new identities. — Sherry Turkle

You are not your past. You are the warrior that rose above it to become the example of someone who didn't survive, but thrived in creating the most beautiful last chapter of their life. — Shannon L. Alder

It makes sense that your response to a bad break-up line would be to set someone on fire," I responded. "Fire is magical to us because it embodies the passage of time. We can never grasp time because it is invisible, unreachable and continually slipping from our grasp. Do we live in the present? How can we? The present is infinitesimally small. It can't contain human action. We teeter on the brink between our assumed future...where we will be in moments to come...and our memory of the past...where we think we just were. The present doesn't exist in a comprehensible way. Similarly, fire is something we can neither grasp nor touch, yet it has a clear effect...the decay and collapse of life, the acceleration of entropy. Thus when we stand mesmerized by fire, we are actually mesmerized by our own mortality. — David David Katzman

However, narrating what you remember, telling it to someone, does something else. The more a person recalls a memory, the more they change it. Each time they put it into language, it shifts. The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, creates a fiction you can live with. It's what writers do. Once you open your mouth, you are moving away from the truth of things. According to neuroscience. The safest memories are locked in the brains of people who can't remember. Their memories remain the closest replica of actual events. Underwater. Forever. — Lidia Yuknavitch

If you have a statue in the city centre you could go past it every day on your way to school and never even notice it, right. But as soon as someone puts a traffic cone on its head, you've made your own sculpture. — Banksy

What is this film (Mirror) about?It is about a Man. No, not the particular man whose voice we hear from behind the screen, played by Innokentiy Smoktunovsky. It's a film about you, your father, your grandfather, about someone who will live after you and who is still "you". About a Man who lives on the earth, is a part of the earth and the earth is a part of him, about the fact that a man is answerable for his life both to the past and to the future. You have to watch this film simply, and listen to the music of Bach and the poems of Arseniy Tarkovsky; watch it as one watches the stars, or the sea, as one admires a landscape. There is no mathematical logic here, for it cannot explain what man is or what is the meaning of his life. (Sculpting in Time) — Andrey Tarkovsky

Someone needs to tell those tales. When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There's magic in that. It's in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift. Your sister may be able to see the future, but you yourself can shape it, boy. Do not forget that ... there are many kinds of magic, after all. — Erin Morgenstern

There comes a moment in life when one must acknowledge that you just can't keep looking back into your past for reasons to keep someone in your present and future. Regardless of how much looking that cruel reality in the eye hurts ... memories can't be enough. — Eiry Nieves

If you have ever been tempted to look up an old girlfriend or boyfriend, you will sympathize with Frederico. If you have doubts about revealing yourself to someone from your past, you'll understand Emma. Did you ever have the urge to open a bookstore? You'll love Dreams & Desires, Emma's bookstore in Milan that specializes in romance. — Vera Marie Badertscher

Air struggles up my throat and past my lips as Mom talks with our new landlady. Even with the air conditioner working at full blast, the air is thin, dry, and empty. I imagine this is how it feels for someone with asthma, this constant fight for breath. As if you can't ever fill your lungs with enough air. I glare at Mom. Of all the places in the world to relocate, she had to choose a desert. I'm certain she's a sadist. — Sophie Jordan

Dear 2600: I need someone with the abilities to get into my school server and change a few things. I have saved up $3500 over the past year for this and am willing to pay it in cash, as I am from the Winnipeg area.
Desperate doesnt begin to cover it. Whatever your problems, and we certainly wont try to minimize them, they are nothing compared to the world of hurt you'll enter if you do stupid things like offer complete strangers money to help you do illegal things ... ..There should be something in your genetic code that alerts you to the fact that you're doing something extremely stupid and wrong. So we're clear, the offer was in Canadian dollars and not American, right? — Emmanuel Goldstein

Venerable architecture critic Witold Rybczynski, for instance, suggests in his book How Architecture Works: A Humanist's Toolkit that "the first question you ask yourself approaching a building is: Where is the front door?" But this is by no means the first architectural question many among us will ask; it is altogether too straightforward a query for a segment of the population. Some of us deliberately and strategically seek out, say, an attic window within reach of a strong tree branch or an unlocked storm shelter leading down into someone's basement, even a badly fit screen door that looks easy to slip through around back. Perhaps you even did this yourself as a teenager, just looking for a new way to sneak out of the house past your bedtime or to avoid the all-seeing gaze of your girlfriend's parents. — Geoff Manaugh

No sketches first, no studies, that's long past:
I do what many dream of, all their lives,
--Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,
And fail in doing. I could count twenty such
On twice your fingers, and not leave this town,
Who strive--you don't know how the others strive
To paint a little thing like that you smeared
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat,--
Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,
(I know his name, no matter)--so much less!
Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.
There burns a truer light of God in them,
In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain,
Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt
This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine.
Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know,
Reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me,
Enter and take their place there sure enough,
Though they come back and cannot tell the world. — Robert Browning

I was aware that we were both silently making those inevitable comparisons, putting our relationship in context. She is more this and less that. He is better or worse in these ways. It is human nature to do this
unless its your first relationship, which might be the very reason that your first relationship feels special and remains forever sacred. But the older you get, the more cynical you become, and the more complicated and convoluted the exercise is. You begin to realize that nothing is perfect, that there are trade-offs and sacrifices. The worst is when someone in your past trumps the person in the present, and you think to yourself: if I'd known this, then maybe I wouldn't have let him go. — Emily Giffin

No one expects Will Herondale to live past nineteen, and no one will be sorry to see him go, either -"
That was too much for Tessa. Without thinking about it she burst out indignantly, "What a thing to say!"
Gabriel, interrupted midrant, looked as shocked as if one of the tapestries had suddenly started talking. "Pardon me?"
"You heard me. Telling someone you wouldn't be sorry if they died! It's inexcusable!" She took hold of Will by the sleeve. "Come along, Will. This - this person - obviously isn't worth wasting your time on."
Will looked hugely entertained. "So true."
... Tessa frowned at Gabriel. "I think you owe Will an apology."
"I," said Gabriel, "would rather have my entrails yanked out and tied in a knot in front of my own eyes than apologize to such a worm."
"Goodness," said Jem mildly. "You can't mean that. Not the Will being a worm part, of course. The bit about the entrails. That sounds dreadful. — Cassandra Clare

After over six hundred hours of listening, John knew two more things: That the most profound truth lay in the labyrinths that coiled behind a green door in the interviewee's mind the very second that Alfred Kinsey said, "Tell me about your fantasies"; and, two, that with the proper information and the correct stimuli he could get carefully chosen people to break through those doors and act out their fantasies, past moral strictures and the boundaries of conscience, taking him past his already absolute knowledge of mankind's unutterable stupidity into a new night realm that he as yet was incapable of imagining. Because the night was there to be plundered; and only someone above its laws could exact its bounty and survive. — James Ellroy

Relationships, like all human experiences, are transient; they change every day and are meant to be enjoyed in the present. When I hear people say you need to "work" at a relationship, what that often really means is just seeing through the day-to-day; listening to another person, listening to yourself, not getting stuck on hurts from the past, and not getting lost in what might come. To be in a relationship with someone you respect, care about and value is a gift, and when you take that in the day-to-day, you honor yourself and your partner each day. Eating is no different in that you can honor yourself at each meal. So much time in relationships is spent hashing the past, and arguing about things that haven't yet happened. A relationship cannot be "hoarded", just like a meal cannot be prolonged by taking home the leftovers. — Ramani Durvasula

And when I realized you had secrets too, I was glad. I thought we could be honest with each other. That we could finally rid ourselves of all the clutter from our past. Not our possessions, but the stuff we carry around inside our heads. Because that's what I've realized, living in One Folgate Street. You can make your surroundings as polished and empty as you like. But it doesn't really matter if you're still messed up inside. And that's all anyone's looking for really, isn't it? Someone to take care of the mess inside our heads? — J.P. Delaney

The moon had been observing the earth close-up longer than anyone. It must have witnessed all of the phenomena occurring - and all of the acts carried out - on this earth. But the moon remained silent; it told no stories. All it did was embrace the heavy past with a cool, measured detachment. On the moon there was neither air nor wind. Its vacuum was perfect for preserving memories unscathed. No one could unlock the heart of the moon. Aomame raised her glass to the moon and asked, "Have you gone to bed with someone in your arms lately?"
The moon did not answer.
"Do you have any friends?" she asked.
The moon did not answer.
"Don't you get tired of always playing it cool?"
The moon did not answer. — Haruki Murakami

One thing I do know about intimacy is that there are certain natural laws which govern the sexual experience of two people, and that these laws cannot be budged any more than gravity can be negotiated with. To feel physically comfortable with someone else's body is not a decision you can make. It has very little to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not. When it isn't there (as I have learned in the past, with heartbreaking clarity) you can no more force it to exist than a surgeon can force a patient's body to accept a kidney from the wrong donor. My friend Annie says it all comes down to one simple question: Do you want your belly pressed against this person's belly forever
or not? — Elizabeth Gilbert

A breeze stirred Dovewing's pelt, as is someone had walked past. She lifted her head an saw two figures standing just beyond her Clanmates. One was a badger with a narrow, striped face, the other a grotesque, hairless cat who's blind, bulging eyes saw nothing but everything. They met her gaze and nodded, just once. "Thank you." Dovewing heard, quieter then a sigh.
"There will be three, kin of your kin, who will hold the power of the stars in their paws. They will find a fourth, and the battle between light and dark will be won. A new leader will rise fro the shadows. This s how it always has been, and always will be."
-Rock and Midnight, The Last Hope — Erin Hunter

How can you fully open your heart to someone new, when in fact...what you really need is closure from your past. — Norman Bridwell

I've learned over the past years what it really means to be able to miss someone. In order to miss someone, that means you were privileged enough to have them in your life to begin with. And while seventeen years doesn't seem like near enough time to have spent with you over the course of a lifetime, it's still seventeen more years than the people that never knew you at all. So if I look at it that way ... I'm pretty damn lucky. I'm the luckiest brother ever in the whole wide world. — Colleen Hoover

Hi!
My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.
A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be. As for me, right now I am sitting in a French maid cafe in Akiba Electricity Town, listening to a sad Chanson that is playing sometime in your past, which is also my present, writing this and wondering about you, somewhere in my future. And if you're reading this, then maybe by now you're wondering about me, too.
You wonder about me.
I Wonder about you.
Who are you and what are you doing? — Ruth Ozeki

If you don't know what those old occupations were, how they were done, and how they interacted with the passersby, you're not prepared to write a historical novel. A historical figure doesn't pass through a blank countryside. That means you, the novelist, must learn by research what the whole place was like in those times. As much as you can, you must be like someone who has lived there, because you're going to be not just the storyteller but also the tour guide taking your readers through the past. — James Alexander Thom

When someone shows you their heart, their past, their wounds, they have entrusted you with the deepest part of themselves. It is the part of themselves that makes them uniquely beautiful. To be trusted in this way is a great honor. Guard that trust with your life. — Yasmin Mogahed

The idea of losing someone that you love could throw you into a situation where you could not see your future and you really would be living in the past. — Tom Ford

Let people repent. Let people grow. Believe that people can change and improve. Is that faith? Yes! Is that hope? Yes! Is it charity? Yes! Above all, it is charity, the pure love of Christ. If something is buried in the past, leave it buried. Don't keep going back with your little sand pail and beach shovel to dig it up, wave it around, and then throw it at someone, saying, "Hey! Do you remember this?" Splat! — Jeffrey R. Holland

My only regret is that no one told me at the beginning of my journey what I'm telling you now: there will be an end to your pain. And once you've released all those pent-up emotions, you will experience a lightness and buoyancy you haven't felt since you were a very young child. The past will no longer feel like a lode of radioactive ore contaminating the present, and you will be able to respond appropriately to present-day events. You will feel angry when someone infringes on your territory, but you won't overreact. You will feel sad when something bad happens to you, but you won't sink into despair. You will feel joy when you have a good day, and your happiness won't be clouded with guilt. You, too, will have succeeded in making history, history. — Patricia Love

He was stricken anew by her, overcome with the knowledge that in the morning he would have to relinquish her. In Prison 33, little by little, you relinquished everything, starting with your tomorrows and all that might be. Next went your past, and suddenly it was inconceivable that your head had ever touched a pillow, that you'd once used a spoon or a toilet, that your mouth had once known flavors and your eyes had beheld colors beyond gray and brown and the shade of black that blood took on. Before you relinquished yourself
Ga had felt it starting, like the numb of cold limbs
you let go of all the others, each person you'd once known. They became ideas and then notions and then impressions, and then they were as ghostly as projections against a prison infirmary. Sun Moon appeared to him now like this, not as a woman, vital and beautiful, making an instrument speak her sorrow, but as the flicker of someone once known, a photo of a person long gone. — Adam Johnson

Chapter 1

I was sitting in Tina's Sunset Restaurant, watching the outriggers shuffle lazily through the clear waters of Sabang Bay, when Tomboy took a seat opposite me, ordered a San Miguel from Tina's daughter, and told me someone else had to die. It was five o'clock in the afternoon, there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and up until that point I'd been in a good mood.

I told him I didn't want to kill people anymore, that it was a part of my past I didn't want to be reminded of, and he replied that he understood all that, but once again we needed the money. 'It's just the way the cookie crumbles.' he added, with the sort of bullshit 'I share your suffering' expression an undertaker might give to one of his customer's relatives. Tomboy Darke was my business partner and a man with a cliche for every occasion, including murder. — Simon Kernick

You know, I think I understand what you're like now. You're very beautiful and you think men are only interested in you because you're beautiful. But you want them to be interested in you because you're you. The problem is, aside from all that beauty, you're not very interesting. You're rude, you're hostile, you're sullen, you're withdrawn ... oh, I know- you want someone to look past all that at the real person underneath. But the only reason anyone would bother to look past all that is because you're beautful. Ironic, isn't it? In an odd way you're your own problem. — Jack Nicholson

When someone points out your past mistakes, look at them dead in the eyes and follow with, 'and I'd do it all again to have the life I have now. — Dan Pearce

If you stay in the company of anger, pain, or hurt, happiness will find someone else to visit. Make the choice to view all of your past relationships as a gift. Throw out what hasn't worked in the past and incorporate new concepts. Focus on being happy. — Kristen Crockett

The present's perfect, young grasshopper, because we're breathing, moving, laughing, crying, and are surprised when we finally meet someone we connect with. Stop living in the past and wasting your present. — Alison G. Bailey

All we have is
the present. The present's perfect, young
grasshopper, because we're breathing,
moving, laughing, crying, and are
surprised when we finally meet someone
we connect with. Stop living in the past
and wasting your present. You need to
tell Noah how you feel. — Alison G. Bailey

the truth remains that whether someone loves you or not has no bearing on how loveable you really are. Your childhood is not the last chapter in your story. Your first love is not your only love. Your greatest heartache is not the whole story of your life. Your parents are not God. An unhappy past, no matter how terrible, is not a reason to say "I am not loveable," nor is it a reason to stop loving yourself. Actually, it is a reason to love yourself more. You can only be held back by your past if you use it to reject yourself in the present. Your life is a love story. It is the story of how much you — Robert Holden

We should have the right to have someone leave when we want, to only allow those in who we want in. But the truth is, people can force their way into your life whenever they choose. If they want to remind you forevermore that they exist, they will. They can reappear in a card or call or a "chance" meeting, they can remember your birthday or the day you met with some innocuous small note. No matter how little they matter in your new life, they can insist on being seen and recognized and remembered. — Deb Caletti

Just because you had a bad experience in a relationship with someone, you're taking it as an excuse never to be in a relationship again. Never to trust. You're letting her control your life even way after you've said goodbye. If you've really moved on, you wouldn't be scared to have a relationship because you would have fully let her and the past go and be able to move on." He — Shaquanda Dalton

Time is so fast that all times are past times! When you look at a photo of the past, you must know that you are already in the album, someone else is looking at your photo! All times are past times! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

In the past, kong-an (koan) practicing meant checking someone's enlightenment. Now we use kong-ans to make our lives correct ... You must use kong-ans to take away your opinions. When you take away your opinions, your mind is clear like space, which means from moment to moment you can reflect any situation and respond correctly and meticulously. — Seungsahn

On Facebook, your past comes into your present when someone from your second grade class suddenly pops up to send you a message, and your future is being manipulated by what Facebook knows to put in front of you next. — Douglas Rushkoff

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

but then.

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

Too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like the future, is dark. There is so much we don't know, and to write truthfully about a life, your own or your mother's, or a celebrated figure's, an event, a crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowning. They tell us that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries, starting with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the absence of exact information. — Rebecca Solnit

GIRL, write YOUR book dammit.
Who cares what people think?
If writers in the past cared what other people thought we'd still be glossing over 'inappropriate' kissing scenes.
Break the fucking rules.
Push yourself to the edge.
Show the world what YOU can do.
This is YOUR book. YOUR blood and guts.
AND, don't you EVER, EVER, write one single line for SOMEONE ELSE. — Madeline Sheehan

Love embraces the totality of the other person. It is impossible to completely and effectively love someone without being included in that other person's history. Our history has made us who we are. The images, scars, and victories that we live with have shaped us into the people we have become. We will never know who a person is until we understand where they have been. The secret of being transformed from a vulnerable victim to a victorious, loving person is found in the ability to open your past to someone responsible enough to share your weaknesses and pains. "Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ" (Gal. 6:2). You don't have to keep reliving it. You can release it. — T.D. Jakes

The silver friend knows your present and the gold friend knows all of your past dirt and glories. Once in a blue moon there is someone who knows it all, someone who knows and accepts you unconditionally, someone who is there for life. — Jill McCorkle

Imagine someone reaching straight into your chest, past the bones and blood and guts, and taking a nice firm hold on your spinal cord. Now imagine that they start shaking you so fast, the world starts bulging and buckling under you. Imagine not being able to figure out later if the thought in your head is really yours or an unintentional keepsake from someone else's mind. Imagine the guilt of knowing you saw someone's deepest, darkest fear or secret ... — Alexandra Bracken

Happy World Peace Day! (November 17th) Here is how you can get involved:
a. Engage in dialogue with someone from a different country or nationality than your own.
b. Let go of the past and renounce vendettas, denounce revenge, and live for the future.
c. Contemplate your life and find the areas that you are in conflict. Work towards solving the conflicts by defusing them through communication or dis-engaging so that the conflicts whither away. Understand the conflict from the viewpoint of your opponent and do not think of winning. Think of co-existing.
d. Close your eyes and breath deeply while clearing your mind of all your troubles. Repeat as needed.
e. Volunteer for a peace organization
f. Read a book on conflict resolution — Kambiz Mostofizadeh

I had always heard rumors of her, Nanook thought, she who can control the wind, the water, the earth, and fire ... she who can talk to time. But those were old myths of a woman who lived many thousands of years ago, the first daughter of the Earth. There is a prophecy that she will return again, during the end times -- every religion has someone like that, someone to wait for and put your faith in, but my culture had mostly covered up her existence. We had a god of the sea, a god of the land, a god of the air, a god of fire, but no one who could control all of the elements. We spoke, only in whispers, of the ancient bloodline -- the descendents of the Great Mother. Too many superstitious minds, too many men concerned only with their own power and position, had heard these whispers in the past and taken gruesome steps to erase the descendents. The lineage was said to be broken, the blood of the Great Mother spilled for the last time. — Sarah Warden

I don't want a man who stands in front of me, because all I see is his back. I don't want a man to stand behind me, because I'd have to dwell on the past just to see his face. I want a man that stands beside me. An equal that holds my hand through whatever mountains and oceans we may cross. Someone who I can trust. I just want your love. — Jennifer Megan Varnadore

Being nice to someone who did you foul in the past is kinda like a mature way of getting revenge because it sometimes confuses the hell out of them & brings them to the realization that they no longer can manipulate your emotions with their actions ... something they thought they'd always be able to do. — David Reeves

When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago
and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail
it's disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you do. It's astonishing to consider all the things from your past that used to happen all the time but (a) never happen anymore, and (b) never even cross your mind. It's almost like those things didn't happen. Or maybe it seems like they just happened to someone else. To someone you don't really know. To someone you just hung out with for one night, and now you can't even remember her name. — Chuck Klosterman

Always remember," said Petra, "a friend is someone who understands your past, believes in you future, and accepts you just the way you are."...

And a friend stands by you, Suzanne thought to herself,...No matter what it cost her. — Laura Childs

Never shut off pain till it eats you up completely. Ensure you find someone you can confide in and trust, share your burdens, cry if you need to by letting it all out. No one is conditioned for pain. We all need to address it and let it go, knowing we cannot change the past but we can make a brighter future out of the lessons learned. — Kemi Sogunle

A friend is someone who understands your past, believes in your future and accepts you for who you are today. — Aleatha Romig

Dear five-year-old, What the fuck is wrong with you? Normal children don't have dead imaginary friends. Normal children don't pick open every single one of their chicken pox scabs and then stand naked and bleeding in the darkened doorway to their bedroom until someone walks past and asks what they are doing. Furthermore, normal children don't respond by saying, "I wanted to know what all my blood would look like." Normal children also don't watch their parents sleep from the corner of the room. Mom was really scarred by The Exorcist when she was younger, and she doesn't know how to cope with your increasingly creepy behavior. Please stop. Please, please stop. — Allie Brosh

Deep listening, compassionate listening is not listening with the purpose of analyzing or even uncovering what has happened in the past. You listen first of all in order to give the other person relief, a chance to speak out, to feel that someone finally understands him or her. Deep listening is the kind of listening that helps us to keep compassion alive while the other speaks, which may be for half an hour or forty-five minutes. During this time you have in mind only one idea, one desire: to listen in order to give the other person the chance to speak out and suffer less. This is your only purpose. Other things like analyzing, understanding the past, can be a by-product of this work. But first of all listen with compassion. Compassion — Thich Nhat Hanh

Fuck anyone who thinks anything on someone like you could ever be anything beautiful. You should be proud of them, baby."
"Proud?"
"Yes, proud. They make you powerful. Each line is a road travelled, an experience you had, whether it was good or bad. Each mark is proof of pain in the past, not the present. You are a survivor, you are a warrior. These are the scalps hanging from your fucking belt. You took the beatings and here you are, in front of me. You are fucking amazing. — T.M. Frazier

And before you say this is all far-fetched, just think how far the human race has come in the past ten years. If someone had told your parents, for example, that they would be able to carry their entire music library in their pocket, would they have believed it? Now we have phones that have more computing power than was used to send some of the first rockets into space. We have electron microscopes that can see individual atoms. We routinely cure diseases that only fifty years ago was fatal. and the rate of change is increasing. Today we are able to do what your parents would of dismissed as impossible and your grandparents nothing short of magical. — Nicolas Flamel

Sometimes you met someone that changed the pattern, who wormed their way past the cracks in your heart, caulked them up, sealed themselves in, and stayed there. Sometimes they did it by insisting you meet them at every step, as Jamie had done to me. — Diana Peterfreund