Survive The Past Quotes & Sayings

There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say. — Hannah Arendt

A common romantic script is the rescue. One person has a horrible past of abuse and betrayal and latches on to a romantic partner who wants to be the hero and protect her from all badness. The protection from harm quickly becomes a protection from consequences. The rescued princess uses the relationship as a safe environment where growth and becoming strong are not necessary. The relationship quickly becomes co-dependent. The victim cannot survive on her own, and the rescuer gets his identity from shielding her from the world. — Rory Miller

I enjoyed this scene; and yet my enjoyment was embittered both by the memory of the past, and the anticipation of the future. I was formed for peaceful happiness. During my youthful days discontent never visited my mind; and if I was ever overcome by ennui, the sight of what is beautiful in nature, or the study of what is excellent and sublime in the productions of man, could always interest my heart, and communicate elasticity to my spirits. But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit, what I shall soon cease to be
a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to others, and intolerable to myself. — Mary Shelley

Dear Judy Blume, why didn't you write a book about how to survive talking to your centuries-old, super-duper experienced, smoking-hot soul mate about sex for the first time ever? That book would have been extremely helpful in preparing me for this incredibly awkward situation. — Karen Amanda Hooper

I'm interested in utopian communities of the past. Many of them didn't survive and I'm examining closely the reasons they failed. — Marina Abramovic

Larry's short list for doing better: Stop complaining about your results. (No one really cares, anyway.) Whining about the problem only prolongs the problem. Take a realistic look at your results and think about what you have done or not done in the past that contributed to them. Go to the closest mirror, look yourself in the eye, and say, "This is all my fault." Take responsibility. Do a reality check and admit that change has been going on for a good long while and you survived. You will survive this, too. Make a list of what you are going to do differently in the future to change your results. Doing better is the result of deciding to do better and then taking action on that decision. Get — Larry Winget

Facing future I see hope, hope that we will survive, hope that we will
prosper, hope that once again we will reap the blessings of this
magical land, for without hope I cannot live, remember the past but
do not dwell there, face the future where all our hopes stand. — Israel Kamakawiwo'ole

Never assume you can survive the future because you've survived the past. Everyone thinks that, and they've all been wrong eventually. — Daniel Abraham

Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which nevertheless survive in the memory of generations as the only chronicle of the past. It is as if the people who inhabit the streets, inspired by some mysterious wisdom, relalise that the true history of Calcutta has always been written in the invisible tales of its spirits and unspoken curses. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Embryos think with each stage of their development that they have now reached the only condition that really suits them. This, they say, must certainly be their last, inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto death. What we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to recognize a past and a present as resembling one another. — Samuel Butler

Society continually tells victims to 'get over it', or 'it's in the past'. I can assure you that the treatment of those of us who survive will not be "in the past" as long as one of us draws breath, for we suffer the consequences every second of our existence. — JB Rowley

For the ego to survive, it must make time - past and future - more important than the present moment. — Eckhart Tolle

He glanced helplessly at Ruby, hoping for some help. She was a scribe and had more experience with dwarves than the six hours that Durham had acquired. He's assumed that, as a fellow human, she would make an effort to be some sort of cultural ambassador to help him survive past lunch. Ruby's current interpretation of being helpful seemed to be a silent smirk. — Jeffery Russell

I have to stop this cascade of memories, or at least take them out of their drawer only for a moment, have a brief look, and put them back. I know how to do it now: I have to take the key to acting and apply it to my life. There is no other way to survive except to be in the moment. Just as my accident and its aftermath caused me to redefine what a hero, I've had to take a hard look at what it means to live as fully as possible in the present. How do you survive in the moment when it's bleak and painful and the past seems so seductive? — Christopher Reeve

I don't know how to save the world. I don't have the answers or The Answer. I hold no secret knowledge as to how to fix the mistakes of generations past and present. I only know that without compassion and respect for all of Earth's inhabitants, none of us will survive - nor will we deserve to. — Leonard Peltier

History is natural selection. Mutant versions of the past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise,and old, saurian truths go to the wall, blindfolded and smoking last cigarettes. Only the mutations of the strong survive. The weak, the anonymous, the defeated leave few marks: field-patterns, axe-heads, folk-tales, broken pitchers, burial mounds, the fading memory of their youthful beauty. History loves only those who dominate her: it is a relationship of mutual enslavement. — Salman Rushdie

I felt that I had crossed some threshold, out of the foyer of my life and into the living room. Everything that was the past seemed to be another life. There was before you, and then there was after, and in this after, you were the God I'd never had. I submitted before your needs, and I knew then that I must survive for something more than survival's sake. I must survive for you. You — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existance, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. — George Orwell

Throughout our times with Christopher [therapist] we were encouraged to work together at communicating on the inside. He pointed out that it would be good for us all to listen-in when an alter was telling his/her story - that it's now safe, no harm will come to us from telling or from knowing. There was once a time when it was very important that we didn't know what had happened; that knowing meant danger or being so overwhelmed with pain and grief that we wouldn't survive. But now it was different. We're safe and strong, and our goal now are to uncover the grisly truth of what's happened to us, so that it's no longer a powerful secret. We can look at it and face the past for what it is - old memories of old events. Today is now,and we can choose to live a different way and believe different things. We were once powerless and vulnerable, but now we were in a position to make choices. We had control over our life. — Carolyn Bramhall

The wild is where you find it, not in some distant world relegated to a nostalgic past or an idealized future; its presence is not black or white, bad or good, corrupted or innocent... We are of that nature, not apart from it. We survive because of it, not instead of it. — Renee Askins

On the last day of her visit I drove your grandmother to the airport. Your mother was her only child, as you are my only child, and having watched you grow I know that nothing could possibly be more precious to her. She said to me, "You take care of my daughter."
When she got out of the car my world had shifted. I felt that I had crossed some threshold out of the foyer of my life and into the living room. Everything that was the past seemed to be another life. There was before you and then there was after and in this after you were the god I'd never had. I submitted before your needs and I knew then that I must survive for something more than survival's sake. I must survive for you. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

All thoughts are just junk. Essentially, they are coming from the limited experience of past. These thoughts are useful for your survival process. You've picked up some amount of information; you want to survive in the world; this information is useful. If you're looking at life itself, these thoughts are meaningless. — Jaggi Vasudev

Trap yourself inside your own brain, switch off the light, block all the escape routes, then turn your back on everything you know to be reality and try and survive there. Try. Living. Nowhere. — Carla H. Krueger

The past might hurt but don't run from it, repeat it, or punish others for it. Learn from it and be glad that you survived it. — Rob Liano

Old customs are easy to forget with the flashing of events in our lives. Easy to forget, like the heavy clothing we once wore to survive the winters. It is an old custom, the handing down of things. A good knife, a well-made pipe, a heavy robe. Tradition falls prey to constant change, and creativity becomes so revered that the past is a relic, only to be admired. But in this coat, I was held to the earth, pulled to the past by its weight. — Craig Childs

And no one moans: there is no anguish. Only our nocturnal silence when we crawl on all fours toward the fires that someone has lit for us at a mysterious hour and with incomprehensible finality. We're guided by fate, though we've left nothing to chance. A writer must resemble a censor, our elders told us, and we've followed that marvelous thought to its penultimate consequence. A writer must resemble a newspaper columnist. A writer must resemble a dwarf and MUST survive. If we didn't have to read too, our work would be a point suspended in nothingness, a mandala pared down to a minimum of meaning, our silence, our certainty of standing with one foot dangling on the far side of death. Fantasies. Fantasies. In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats. Castrated cats wedded to cats with slit throats. — Roberto Bolano

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

The frontier will nevertheless survive in the attitudes a few of us inherited from it. One of those attitudes
to me a beatitude
is the conviction that the past matters, that history weighs on us and refuses to be forgotten by us, and that the worst poverty women
or men
can suffer is to be bereft of their past. — Shirley Abbott

How did anyone survive this world, with these bodies whose memories wouldn't stay in the past where they should? With the emotions that were so strond I couldn't tell what I felt anymore? — Stephenie Meyer

You cannot survive if you do not know the past. — Oriana Fallaci

We can choice to cower at the river's edge, watching as life sails past us, always the bystander, never the participant. We can shade our eyes and fret about all the untold dangers below the surface. We can play and replay all the warnings we've ever heard.
Or.
Or we can equip ourselves with what we need to survive — Justina Chen

I can't - Kestrel, you must understand that I would never claim you. Calling you a prize - my prize - it was only words. But it worked. Cheat won't harm you, I swear that he won't, but you must ... hide yourself a little. Help a little. Just tell us how much time we have before the battle. Give him a reason to decide you're not better off dead. Swallow your pride."
"Maybe it's not as easy for me as it is for you."
He wheeled on her. "It's not easy for me," "You know that it's not. What do you think I have had to swallow these past ten years? What do you think I have had to do to survive?"
"Truly," she said, "I haven't the faintest interest. You may tell your sad story to someone else."
He flinched as if slapped. His voice came low: "You can make people feel so small. — Marie Rutkoski

They take the greats from the past and compare us. I wonder if they'd ever survive in this era. In a time where it's recreation, to pull all your skeletons out the closet like Halloween decorations. — Drake

It's not the strongest or the most intelligent who survive, but those most adaptive to change. Over the past 10 years, the need for, and focus on, adaptability has accelerated. — Kenneth I. Chenault

One must break with one's past to embrace one's future. It is never an easy thing to do. It is one of the distinguishing characteristics between survivors and victims. Letting go of what was, to survive what is. (Page 106) — Karen Marie Moning

Cate had told me once, a long time ago, that the only was to survive your past was to find a way to close it off behind you, to shut one door before passing into another, brighter room. I was afraid. That was the truth. I was terridied of the guilt and shame that would come flooding in when I retraced my steps, turned the lock, and found the girl I had abandoned. — Alexandra Bracken

To whoever will listen.

I've been thinking about black holes a lot. How their gravity is so strong it bends time and space. How you'd be stretched down to atoms passing the event horizon.

I kind of feel like I'm being stretched to atoms. Like I'm falling apart and becoming so metaphorically thin that I'm transparent. But, as nothing that happens past the event horizon affects the universe outside of it, nothing that I'm feeling is affecting anyone in the outside world, either.

The event horizon is a point of no return. Nothing, not even light, can escape it.

I wonder what will happen when I pass the event horizon and fully submerge myself into the black hole.

There are theories that if you enter a blackhole under a specific angle, you'll survive and hit the bottom of it. The chances are incredibily small.

I doubt I'll survive. — Emily Trunko

Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all — George Orwell

In the past, surviving into old age was uncommon, and those who did survive served a special purpose as guardians of tradition, knowledge, and history. — Atul Gawande

In the wink of an eye, all quaint days of the past, the present, and future will meld together into the bottomless unknown of perpetuity. Only trace evidence of our invertebrate existence will anoint future generations. In the crinkle of time, our houses will crumble apart. Companies that we worked for will go out of business or merge with other nameless conglomerates. What will survive us are our children and our words. — Kilroy J. Oldster

For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another. — Virginia Woolf

The NeXT purchase is too little too late. The Apple of the past was an innovative company that used software and hardware technology together to redefine the way people experienced computing. That Apple is already dead. Very adroit moves might be able to save the brand name. A company with the letters A-P-P-L-E in its name might survive, but it won't be the Apple of yore. — Nathan Myhrvold

Over the past 30 years, hand grenades, tanks, fighter jets, missiles, helicopters and assault rifles have replaced traditional floral patterns in rug making and other textiles. Depicting these realities of war has helped the Afghan people to survive during times of conflict. — Henri Cole

Love seems to survive life, and to reach beyond it. I think we take it with us past the grave. Do we not still give it to those who have left us? May we not hope that they feel it for us, and that we shall leave it here in one or two fond bosoms, when we also are gone? — William Makepeace Thackeray

All that is, was, and will be. Universe much too big to see. Time and space never ending, disturbing thoughts, questions pending. Limitations of human understanding. Too quick to criticize, obligation to survive, we hunger to be alive. All that is, ever, ever was, will be ever twisting, turning, Through The Never. In the dark, see past our eyes. Pursuit of truth, no matter where it lies. Gazing up to the breeze of the heavens, on a quest, meaning, reason. Come to be, how it begun. All alone in the family of the sun, curiosity teasing everyone. On our home, third stone from the sun. — James Hetfield

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

As the hours, the days, the weeks, the seasons slip by, you detach yourself from everything. You discover, with something that sometimes almost resembles exhilaration, that you are free. That nothing is weighing you down, nothing pleases or displeases you. You find, in this life exempt from wear and tear and with no thrill in it other than these suspended moments, in almost perfect happiness, fascinating, occasionally swollen by new emotions. You are living in a blessed parenthesis, in a vacuum full of promise, and from which you expect nothing. You are invisible, limpid, transparent. You no longer exist. Across the passing hours, the succession of days, the procession of the seasons, the flow of time, you survive without joy and without sadness. Without a future and without a past. Just like that: simply, self evidently, like a drop of water forming on a drinking tap on a landing. — Georges Perec

Love needs to be nurtured and fed to survive; and our suffering also survives because we enable and feed it. We ruminate on suffering, regret, and sorrow. We chew on them, swallow them, bring them back up, and eat them again and again. If we're feeding our suffering while we're walking, working, eating, or talking, we are making ourselves victims of the ghosts of the past, of the future, or our worries in the present. We're not living our lives. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Meditation is an expression of tender courage. It suggests that it is refreshing to meet the nakedness of situations with your own nakedness, here and now. Outside of nowness we fail to genuinely appreciate our lives because we are struggling to survive in time, projecting ourselves into the future or attempting to resolve the past. — Ira Rechtshaffer

Don't let life's challenges discourage you. Some things are just out of your control. Make it work for you! The most painful lessons of the past can teach you how to survive in the present . — Carlos Wallace

We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present. Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

My grandmother lived a remarkable life. She watched her nation fall to pieces; and even when she became collateral damage, she believed in the power of the human spirit. She gave when she had nothing; she fought when she could barely stand; she clung to tomorrow when she couldn't find footing on the rock ledge of yesterday. She was a chameleon, slipping into the personae of a privileged young girl, a frightened teen, a dreamy novelist, a proud prisoner, an army wife, a mother hen. She became whomever she needed to be to survive, but she never let anyone else define her.
By anyone's account, her existence had been full, rich, important - even if she chose not to shout about her past, but rather to keep it hidden. It had been nobody's business but her own; it was still nobody's business. — Jodi Picoult

Sometimes, Ms. Lane," he said, "one must break with one's past to embrace one's future. It is never an easy thing to do. It is one of the distinguishing characteristics between survivors and victims. Letting go of what was, to survive what is. — Karen Marie Moning

The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep. — Loren Eiseley

Marriage is the lightning rod that absorbs anxiety and stress from all other sources, past and present. When marriage has a firm foundation of solid friendship and mutual respect, it can tolerate a fair amount of raw emotion. A good fight can clear the air, and it's nice to know we can survive conflict and even learn from it. Many couples, however, get trapped in endless rounds of fighting and blaming that they don't know how to get out of. When fights go unchecked and unrepaired, they can eventually erode love and respect, which are the bedrock of any successful relationship. — Harriet Lerner

They say no one person can do it all
But you want to in your head
But you can't be Shakespeare and you can't be Joyce
So what is left instead

You're stuck with yourself and a rage that can hurt you
You have to start at the beginning again
And just this moment
This wonderful fire started up again

When you pass through humble, when you pass through sickly
When you pass through, I'm better than you all
When you pass through anger and self deprecation
And have the strength to acknowledge it all

When the past makes you laugh and you can savor the magic
That let you survive your own war
You find that that fire is passion
And there's a door up ahead, not a wall

- "Magic And Loss" The Summation — Lou Reed

In the lingering moments before you die your body releases DMT. The same drug that makes you dream. The same drug found in every living animal. It's not an evolutionary trick to make you survive. Your body is choosing to release this drug now because it believes your fate is too grim for you to comprehend. So you dream. You dream that everything will be fine. You dream that nothing happened at all. It's in this moment that your body sits across from you. It tells you 'looks like we're not gonna make it this time.' You sit around a fire and recollect the past before soon parting ways back to the atomic ether. Your body does this because it loves you. You have never met anyone like your body. Your body has been with you everyday, good and bad. It's even kept a journal of your life carved in scars. Your eyelashes always wiped the tears from your eyes. — Anonymous

The thunderbirds, like dinosaurs, were now creatures of the past: lost long ago, with the coming of disease and famine brought by hairy strangers. Except, in today's world dinosaurs were celebrated by palaeontologists and thunderbirds by cultural anthropologists. But John still remembered them, those magnificent creatures. (...) They, like the man on the motorcycle, had been born in an age when gods, monsters, humans and animals ate at the same table. Now man ate alone, while animals begged for scraps. The others were unable to survive in the new times and had disappeared into the folds of time. Who knew gods and monsters could and did fall victim to evolution? — Drew Hayden Taylor

In the past, it was possible to destroy a village, a town, a region, even a country. Now it is the whole planet that has come under threat. This fact should compel everyone to face a basic moral consideration; from now on, it is only through a conscious choice and then deliberate policy that humanity will survive. — Pope John Paul II

In the past underwhelming products could survive and thrive merely on distribution alone. A bad product, backed by a large television campaign and retail distribution, could find growth and profits for the company, regardless of quality. This is no longer the case. Today, mediocre products can still be launched in this way, but their longevity and returns quickly crash as word of mouth spreads and demand dries up faster than ever before. — Sean Ellis

Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,
Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin ... Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History is not Chronology, for that is left to Lawyers,
nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other,
her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit,
that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever,
not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,
rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common. — Thomas Pynchon

Often I would hear other people ask, "When will I be normal again?"
What you don't often hear is a blunt truth: things will never be normal again. Not the "old" normal at least. You have to invent the new normal.
I knew that I needed to take an honest appraisal of my life. Were my problems really bigger than me? Of course not. That's why I remained in constant motion. Resistance to life's changes meant death. No matter how depressing and bleak my past looked, I knew that I needed to keep moving and adapting in order to survive. — Michelle Dallocchio

The old music industry is dead. We're standing in the ruins of a business built on private jets, Cristal, $18 CDs and million-dollar recording budgets. We're in the midst of the greatest music industry disruption of the past 100 years. A fundamental shift has occurred - a shift that Millennials are driving. For the first time, record sales aren't enough to make an artist's career, and they certainly aren't enough to ensure success. The old music industry clung desperately to sales to survive, but that model is long gone.2 - Honeyman — Larry Wacholtz

What are the final lessons learned? I came to the conclusion that the most powerful human motive by far is the striving for attachment to loved ones in perpetuity. Humans will do anything for this, including blowing themselves (and others) to pieces. I learned that tribalism is universal. It may start with the attachment to another (typically, the mother and disinterest in those who are not her), and it may be furthered by the division of in-group as those we recognize and out-group as the rest, but our capacity for symbolism established in- and outgroups in us all, and we view their actions completely differently. We need, if we are to survive, a sense both of humanity as a tribe and of humanity's potential for radical violence. If we delude ourselves that we are the civilized entity we appear to be on the surface, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, only with more powerful and devastating weapons. — Donald G. Dutton

I now believe truth lies not in logic but in hope, both past and future. I believe hope can surprise you. It can survive the odds against it, all sorts of contradictions, and certainly any skeptic's rationale of relying on proof through fact. — Amy Tan

Universities used to prepare young adults for the real world. I dare say the graduates today go in without a clue and graduate without a clue. It's time to acknowledge the college degree is not worth what it was in the past. Times are changing, and so is the way we prepare our youth to survive in a competitive world. — Dale Archer

Stop feeling useless and worthless. Stop drowning in regret. Stop listening to the persistent voice of your past failures. You were that child once, who Margo would have killed for. Fight for yourselves. You have a right to live, and to live well. You'll inherit flaws; you'll develop new ones. And that's okay. Wear them, own them, use them to survive. Don't kill others; don't kill yourselves. Be bold about your right to be loved. And most importantly, don't be ashamed of where you've come from, or the mistakes you've made. In blindness, love will exhume you. — Tarryn Fisher

In the past, we had objects to believe in - objects of belief. These have disappeared. But we also had objects not to believe in, which is just as vital a function. Transitional objects, ironic ones, so to speak, objects of our indifference, ... Ideologies played this role reasonably well. These, too, have disappeared. And we survive only by a reflex action of collective credulity, which consists not only in absorbing everything put about under the heading of news or information, but in believing in the principal and transcendence of information. — Jean Baudrillard

An extraterrestrial visitor examining the differences among human societies would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities. Our lives, our past and our future are tied to the sun, the moon and the stars ... We humans have seen the atoms which constitute all of nature and the forces that sculpted this work ... and we, who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos, have begun to wonder about our origins ... star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion atoms, contemplating the evolution of nature, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet earth ... Our loyalties are to the species and to the planet. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos ancient and vast from which we spring. We are one species. We are star stuff harvesting star light. — Carl Sagan

Humanity has survived because the strong among us have, in the past, been obliged to help the weak. Without this, we would not survive. — Hany Abu-Assad

My scars remind me that I did indeed survive my deepest wounds. That in itself is an accomplishment. And they bring to mind something else, too. They remind me that the damage life has inflicted on me has, in many places, left me stronger and more resilient. What hurt me in the past has actually made me better equipped to face the present. — Steve Goodier

We have to fight the past to survive. — Pierre Boulez

She sits down and puts her hand to her chest and rocks. Thinks of all she has lost and will lose. All she has had and will have. It seems to her that life is like gathering berries into an apron with a hole. Why do we keep on? Because the berries are beautiful, and we must eat to survive. We catch what we can. We walk past what we lose for the promise of more, just ahead. — Elizabeth Berg

It was a cruel world though. More than half of all children died before they could reach maturity, thanks to chronic epidemics and malnutrition. People dropped like flies from polio and tuberculosis and smallpox and measles. There probably weren't many people who lived past forty. Women bore so many children, they became toothless old hags by the time they were in their thirties. People often had to resort to violence to survive. Tiny children were forced to do such heavy labor that their bones became deformed, and little girls were forced to become prostitutes on a daily basis. Little boys too, I suspect. Most people led minimal lives in worlds that had nothing to do with richness of perception or spirit. City streets were full of cripples and beggars and criminals. Only a small fraction of the population could gaze at the moon with deep feeling or enjoy a Shakespeare play or listen to the beautiful music of Dowland. — Haruki Murakami

I am inspired by the women I meet everywhere I go. They have to work so hard just to make sure their families survive, but somehow they stay optimistic and do everything in their power to make the future better than the past. — Melinda Gates

The past cannot survive in your presence. It can only survive in your absence. — Eckhart Tolle

There can be no intellectual, spiritual, or emotional life without the substratum of memory. Without cognition and awareness of beauty and appreciation of our limited time on planet Earth, humankind's sojourn would be a colorless collage composed of the base acts of a biological mass endeavoring merely to survive. Without the ability to recall striking memories, our emotional life would be stillborn. Absent authentic memories, our life struggles would seem purposeless: human beings would exhibit no capacity to reflect awe when witnessing the bounty of nature's plenitude or be able to take in and express intense reverence for all that is sacred. Without memory, there would not be a dais to support faith or any ability to imagine a God; the concepts of good and evil would be nonexistent; and the past and the future would become less relevant than the choice between salt or pepper, and paper or plastic. — Kilroy J. Oldster

To survive
Let the past
Teach you-
Past customs,
Struggles,
Leaders and thinkers.
Let
These
Help you.
Let them inspire you,
Warn you,
Give you strength.
But beware:
God is change.
Past is past.
What was
Cannot
Come again..

To survive,
know the past.
Let it touch you.
Then let
The past
Go. — Octavia E. Butler

Magic And Loss (The Summation)
They say no one person can do it all
But you want to in your head
But you can't be Shakespeare and you can't be Joyce
So what is left instead
You're stuck with yourself and a rage that can hurt you
You have to start at the beginning again
And just this moment
This wonderful fire started up again
When you pass through humble, when you pass through sickly
When you pass through, I'm better than you all
When you pass through anger and self deprecation
And have the strength to acknowledge it all
When the past makes you laugh and you can savor the magic
That let you survive your own war
You find that that fire is passion
And there's a door up ahead, not a wall — Lou Reed

And I knew the point of love right then.
The point of love was to help you survive.
The point was also to forget meaning. To stop looking and start living. The meaning was to hold the hand of someone you cared about and to live inside the present. Past and future were myths. The past was just the present that had died and the future would never exist anyway, because by the time we got to it the future would have turned into the present. The present was all there was. — Matt Haig

It's not love that the past needs in order to survive, it's an absence of choices. — Susan Sontag

The gut wrenching howling as they informed me, "dead on arrival. Baby could not survive outside her mother's womb." Every finite detail of the worst night of my life played through my mind in HD Technicolor. Somewhere in the haze between past and reality, I heard a soft voice. "Nik? Can you hear me? Come back, you're scaring me, — Lora Ann

There outside there is a lot of stuff which you learn, the clock illusion, that you live in the past, that you can survive without a brain but not for long period...What Is Consciousness? And many other stuff... (so the question which has left, do you have the time to do it?) — Deyth Banger

My responsibility in the past, when I was sleeping outside every night, was just to survive. My responsibility now is to stay real, stay grounded, and just tell the truth. — Jimmy Wayne

The only way to survive your past was to find a way to close it off behind you, to shut one door before passing into another, brighter room. — Alexandra Bracken

Is this how you will die? Is this what you were meant for? To simply be bled out like a pig?
A spark of rage flickers, an antidote to despair.
Will you not even try to survive? Did the scientists make you too stupid even to consider fighting for your own life?
Emiko closes her eyes and prays to Mizuko Jizo Bodhisattva, and then the bakeneko cheshire spirit for good measure. She takes a breath, and then with all her strength she slams her hand against the knife. The blade slices past her neck, a searing line.
"Arai wa?!" the man shouts.
Emiko shoves hard against him and ducks under his flailing knife. Behind her, she hears a grunt and thud as she bolts for the street. She doesn't look back. She plunges into the street, not caring that she shows herself as a windup, not caring that in running she will burn up and die. She runs, determined only to escape the demon behind her. She will burn, but she will not die passive like some pig led to slaughter. — Paolo Bacigalupi

You cannot learn from the mistakes of the past if you do not have the truth. You cannot make amends for mistakes if you do not have the truth. You cannot build a future if you do not have the truth. A nation cannot survive if it does not have the courage and the strength to face the truth. — P.B. Wells

It's a bit counter-intuitive to think about the future in terms of the past. But ... I've learned an important trick: to develop foresight, you need to practice hindsight. Technologies, cultures, and climates may change, but our basic human needs and desires - to survive, to care for our families, and to lead happy, purposeful lives - remain the same.' p 5 — Jane McGonigal

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

Memory is igneous more than ingenious, igneous, and like granite, intrusive, heaved up within oneself, the whole range of one's life, mountains' forbidding height looming over the plains where one lives, mountains formed by the life already lived, but toward which one is always walking, one's own past ahead of him, seeking the improbable path already forged, this path back through oneself, this path we call the present tense, which becomes the continental divide when the tense shifts and the path is lost, path from which the walker emerges only to turn around and see the peaks pulled up by his feet, and the snowy pass, and alpine heights, where those stranded must sometime feed on themselves to survive, where sometimes, through the icy crust, the crocus blooms. — Dan Beachy-Quick

Put it this way. As long as Jeyaretnam [Workers' Party leader] stands for what he stands for -- a thoroughly destructive force for me -- we will knock him. There are two ways of playing this. One, a you attack the policies; two, you attack the system. Jeyaretnam was attacking the system, he brought the Chief Justice into it. If I want to fix you, do I need the Chief Justice to fix you? Everybody knows that in my bag I have a hatchet, and a very sharp one. You take me on, I take my hatchet, we meet in the cul-de-sac. That's the way I had to survive in the past. That's the way the communists tackled me. He brought the Chief Justice into the political arena. He brought my only friend in university into our quarrel. How dare he! — Lee Kuan Yew

Words, so much more readily remembered, gradually replace our past with their own. Our birth pangs become pages. Our battles, our triumphs, our trophies, our stubbed toes, will survive only in their descriptions; because it is the gravestone we visit, when we visit, not the grave. It is against the stone we stand our plastic flowers. Who wishes to bid good morrow to a box of rot and bones? We say a name, and only a faint simulacrum of its object forms itself (if any at all does)- forms itself in that grayless gray area of consciousness where we put imaginary maps and once heard music; where we hunt for lost articles and diagram desire. — William H Gass

We survive the packages of pain God allows in our lives by remembering who God is and what He has done in the past. — Linda Dillow

The child must adapt to ensure the illusion of love, care, and kindness, but the adult does not need this illusion to survive. He can give up his amnesia and then be in a position to determine his actions with open eyes. Only this path will free him from his depression. Both the depressive and the grandiose person completely deny their childhood reality by living as though the availability of the parents could still be salvaged: the grandiose person through the illusion of achievement, and the depressive through his constant fear of losing "love." Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact. — Alice Miller

She must face the forest of her mother's past in order to save herself and the one she loves. — Carrie Ryan

I'm well past the age where I'm acceptable. You get to a certain age and you are forbidden access. You're not going to get the kind of coverage that you would like in music magazines, you're not going to get played on radio and you're not going to get played on television. I have to survive on word of mouth. — David Bowie

The writer must proudly consent to bear his own date, knowing that there are no masterpieces in eternity, but only works in history, and that they survive only to the degree that they have left the past behind them and heralded the future. — Alain Robbe-Grillet

Every time I write about life, I must kill and eat the actual event. I mean to say that my words are scavengers who need to devour lifeless substance if they are to survive as non-fiction. The event is dead, it ceased to be as soon as it happened. The closest I can come to resurrecting the past is to feed my memories to a ravenous swarm of sentences, punctuation and paragraphs. They chew up and digest the things I remember, producing a waste product I think of as an honest account. Reality suffers a second death through this process. False memories, both organic and manufactured, erase the genuine article in order to reassemble the factors into a serviceable construct. True story. — Alex Bosworth

I've thought a lot about how if something horrible happened, and if it were like 'The Road' situation, I've decided I don't want to survive past the death of society as we know it. — Gillian Jacobs

Sometimes the spirit of a man isn't strong enough to survive the ghosts of his past — Colleen Hoover