Undoing The Past Quotes & Sayings

Have only this consolation
that he was never a fiend or even truly a madman, but only an eager, studious, and curious boy whose love of mystery and of the past was his undoing. He stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to know, and reached back through the years as no one ever should reach; and something came out of those years to engulf him. — H.P. Lovecraft

You want to feel sorry for him, but he was his own undoing. — Ridley Pearson

At her easiest, she was hard, because her brain was always working, working, working - I had to exert myself just to keep pace with her. I'd spend an hour crafting a casual e-mail to her, I became a student of arcana so I could keep her interested: the Lake poets, the code duello, the French Revolution. Her mind was both wide and deep, and I got smarter being with her. And more considerate, and more active, and more alive, and almost electric, because for Amy, love was like drugs or booze or porn: There was no plateau. Each exposure needed to be more intense than the last to achieve the same result.
Amy made me believe I was exceptional, that I was up to her level of play. That was both our making and undoing. Because I couldn't handle the demands of greatness. I began craving ease and averageness, and I hated myself for it, and ultimately, I realized, I punished her for it. I turned her into the brittle, prickly thing she became. — Gillian Flynn

I think it's safe to say that the entire abortion industry is based on a lie ... . I am dedicated to spending the rest of my life undoing the law that bears my name, — Norma McCorvey

But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing. — Virginia Woolf

People call Kong "a monster." He's not. There's nothing evil about Kong. He's just another creature who has opened up a little bit of his heart to Ann and it proves to be his undoing. — Peter Jackson

Surely the weakness of our monarchy in Saudi Arabia is bound up in our addiction to extravagance. I fear it will be our undoing. — Jean Sasson

Pastor Smith did not have the religious constitution needed to provide salvation for any of us who'd had a hand in this tragic event. We had put on the armour of God, and there was no undoing what we had done. My faith, my belief in myself as a good citizen, everything I had thought was truth was scattered to the wind, and no one on this earth could put that to rights. Things weren't as simple as living and dying. I understood that now. — Cheryl R Cowtan

I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet. — Carl Rakosi

My beautiful swan. My savior and my undoing. — J.A. Redmerski

He's never stared at her like this before. Sometimes he gazed at her as if he wanted to be her undoing, but just then it was as if he wanted her to undo him. — Stephanie Garber

Safe! Such a colorful, horrible bog of lace and silks as I have hopes of never seeing again! You have proven to be our hero, kind Sir, for indeed, had you not been there to grant the way of escape, I fear we would have certainly met our undoing! With lace underfoot and egos overhead, not even the strongest woman has hope of weathering such a place! — Lindsey Renee Backen

Beware of your habits. The better they are the more surely they will be your undoing. — Holbrook Jackson

Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing. — Rainer Maria Rilke

For conservatives, the issue is that for generations now, they have failed to make the case for their values. They haven't even conveyed conservative values to many of their children. And when they have, the university has often succeeded in undoing them. — Dennis Prager

Your early successes can be your undoing later. — Michael Hyatt

We do ourselves the most good doing something for others. — Horace Mann

Never before have people been so infantalized, made so dependant on the machine for everything; as the earth rapidly approaches its extinction due to technology, our souls are shrunk and flattened by its pervasive rule. Any sense of wholeness and freedom can only return by the undoing of the massive division of labour at the heart of technological progress. This is the liberatory project in all its depth. — John Zerzan

To make the world. To make it again and again. To make it in the very maelstrom of its undoing. — Cormac McCarthy

The researchers found that nearly every change they made was followed by a temporary uptick in performance, even when it involved simply undoing a previous change. They concluded that the increases in worker productivity were not due to better lighting or better pay or longer breaks per se. They were just temporary improvements caused by a change in routine. — Hal Herzog

[Fire] is lightfooted and shamanic, dancing between the visible and invisible, undoing matter one collapsed molecule at a time, wreaking utter destruction with a touch softer than breath. Its poor cousins, wind and water, are one-dimensional rubes by comparison. Wind is all push, push, push. Water is suffocating, but passively so. And even when water gets it together to be a torrent or a tsunami, it is but wet wind. Fire is at once elemental and otherworldly. Fire dances on the grave of all it destroys. Fire is serious voodoo. — Michael Perry

There is only one law of Nature-the second law of thermodynamics-which recognises a distinction between past and future more profound than the difference of plus and minus. It stands aloof from all the rest ... It opens up a new province of knowledge, namely, the study of organisation; and it is in connection with organisation that a direction of time-flow and a distinction between doing and undoing appears for the first time. — Arthur Eddington

A thousand regrets I've had in love,
A thousand times I've longed to change the past.
I know, my love, there is no going back.
No undoing of our thousand burdens.
We must go on despite our heavy hearts.
A thousand regrets I've had in love, but I shall never regret you. — Rachel Hartman

platform. Outside an old man in overalls was working his way along the wagons, undoing padlocks, throwing bolts, hauling the massive panel doors back along their tracks. Apart from him, no one. Could it be this simple? He didn't pause to ask himself the question a second time. Just sprang down from the opening onto the concrete siding and began walking, head lowered and limping at first, until the oxygen started flowing through his bloodstream and the muscles of his legs began to work then, as they did, quickening his pace and striding faster, lifting his head to the seamless pale blue dawn sky and tasting the breath of freedom. He found a covered overpass that seemed to connect the freight platforms with the main terminal. Took the stairs two at a time and started across the bridge towards the massive building at the other side. The station hall was a curiously romantic — Greg Wilson

Right you guessed the rising morrow
And scorned to tread the mire you must:
Dust's your wages, son of sorrow,
But men may come to worse than dust.
Souls undone, undoing others,-
Long time since the tale began.
You would not live to wrong your brothers:
Oh lad, you died as fits a man. — A.E. Housman

According to this, it's not the Twelve that is going to be the undoing of the Daughter of Light, but the Thirteenth Warrior." "Antonio Banderas is going to be my undoing? I'm rife with anticipation. — Darynda Jones

My darling. You're going to be my undoing. — Karina Halle

Life is sometimes to be watched as a retarded bird, uninspired by it. It may indeed be threaded, not as a precision course but as an affirmation of its own undoing. — Dew Platt

I have to expend an awful lot of energy actively undoing the impact of my name. Understandably, people assume that I have at least some connection to Iran. The truth is that I don't. I have very little knowledge about the culture, the language, the history. I've never been to Iran. I've never even been inside a mosque. — Said Sayrafiezadeh

Meditation means a state of unconditioned mind. Meditation is the process of undoing the harm that every society goes on doing to every individual - communist or Catholic, Jaina or Jew, it does not matter. I am not talking about any particular conditioning that is wrong; I am saying conditioning AS SUCH is wrong. — Rajneesh

I could not even imagine any place of secondary importance for myself, and for that very reason I quite contentedly occupied the most insignificant one in real life. Either a hero or dirt - there was no middle way. That turned out to be my undoing, for while wallowing in dirt I consoled myself with the thought that at other times I was a hero, and the hero overlaid the dirt: an ordinary mortal, as it were, was ashamed to wallow in dirt, but a hero was too exalted a person to be entirely covered in dirt, and hence I could wallow in dirt with an easy conscience. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Now is the time for the U.S. and the nations of Western Europe who engaged in the slave trade throughout this hemisphere to come forward in a positive way to assist in undoing the harm that was caused by their past colonial policies in the hemisphere. — Charles B. Rangel

Power surged through him: unfettered power, unimaginable power. It coursed through him and gave life to his maddened cry, feeding it, making it unnecesssary even to breathe. Deeper and deeper his screm became, until it was the primal voice of the very land itself. It was raw, searing. It was the energy of making and undoing, and he had unleashed it. — Derek Donais

They tried to be too clever
and that was their undoing. — Agatha Christie

I respect animals. I have more sympathy for an injured or dead animal than I do for an injured or dead human being, because human beings participate and cooperate in their own undoing. Animals are completely innocent. There are no innocent human beings. — George Carlin

A righteous man is honest, even to his own undoing. — D.J. Molles

Is he aiming at doing anything, or simply undoing what's been done? It's the great misfortune of our government - this paper administration, of which he's a worthy representative. — Leo Tolstoy

Relationships without a Divine Aim always "break up," for they are based on nothing. Divine Purpose could be described as forgiveness -- the undoing and releasing of the ego. Belief in the ego prevents awareness of True Union and Intimacy. The underlying fear of Intimacy and Union is the ego's fear of loss of itself, the 'personal self' and the 'personal world. — David Hoffmeister

Evil is its own undoing. — Veronica Rossi

Life is a paradox. Every truth has its counterpart which contradicts it; and every philosopher supplies the logic his own undoing. — Elbert Hubbard