You Can't Undo The Past Quotes & Sayings

I pulled on the restraints, frustrated, hurting, and completely devastated. I could feel tears sliding down my skin, into my ears, and back over my scalp. Which told me that they'd cut off my hair, too. For some reason, that little bit of vanity was what it took to undo me completely. — Elizabeth Schechter

You can't undo the past. And you can't put it back together either. — Chris Cole

Deputy Grayson?"
He turned to stare down into those soft green eyes, his pulse ratcheting up. "Yes, Miss Smith?"
"Thank you." She touched his arm. "And no matter what happens, I promise I'm not a bad person."
She flung her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek....
Warmth rushed through Nash and tingling spread from where Phoebe's lips had touched his cheek. He raised a hand to the spot and stared at the woman, a frown pulling his brows downward.
He hadn't begun the day with the intent of finding a runaway bride stranded on the side of the road. Scenarios like that were only found in those unrealistic romance novels women liked reading.No. He hadn't asked for a kiss. But now that she'd done it, she couldn't undo it, and he couldn't unfeel it. — Elle James

I do not believe in God, because I believe in man. Whatever his mistakes, man has for thousands of years been working to undo the botched job your god has made. — Emma Goldman

And that whole do-able/undo-able thing? Yeah. Need I point out that neither Ruth nor I have ever "done" anybody in our lives? — Meg Cabot

I was so afraid that I thought I was sick. But was I sick? Did I really have a murmur in my heart? No. The only problem has always been the disquiet of my mind. I can't stop it, I always have to do, redo, cover, uncover, reinforce, and then suddenly undo, break. — Elena Ferrante

Would you trade him in order to undo the past?
That's a question I can't answer. — M. Leighton

The critical task of schizoanalysis, then, is to destroy the power of representation in all its many forms, including the Oedipus complex, the ego, religious and ethnic fanaticisms, patriotism, the debt to capital, and so on; the aim is to expunge belief from the unconscious altogether, to undo molar recoding as much as possible. — Eugene W. Holland

Guilt is not merely a concern with the past; it is a present-moment immobilization about a past event. And the degree of immobilization can run from mild upset to severe depression. If you are simply learning from your past, and vowing to avoid the repetition of some specific behavior, this is not guilt. You experience guilt only when you are prevented from taking action now as a result of having behaved in a certain way previously. Learning from your mistakes is healthy and a necessary part of growth. Guilt is unhealthy because you are ineffectively using up your energy in the present feeling hurt, upset and depressed about a historical happening. And it's futile as well as unhealthy. No amount of guilt can ever undo anything. — Wayne W. Dyer

I can't undo the past. But in the future, I will gladly lay my life down for you, brother. (Styxx) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

With an evil, tempting wink that threatened to undo him, she added, I'm the one you have to watch out for. — Aria Kane

Shock therapy has arguably created a large block of politicized people ready to vote for someone, perhaps a militarist, a quasifascist, or an old-style Communist, to undo the transitional order that has harmed them. — Russell Hardin

In the final seconds before sleep, I wish I could go back and undo everything, give those little girls another chance. — Emily Giffin

When you open yourself to somebody, when you feel these thing that you feel, well, what do you do? You can try to ignore it, maybe you can try to forget about it, but you can't undo it and you can't give it back. — Ann Brashares

You can't undo yesterday, you can work on today, tomorrow, you will wonder how you screwed up 2 days in a row — Eddie Long

Why are you all buttoned up like that?" Cameron ran his gaze down the blackberry-shaped buttons of her bodice.[ ... ] "You were happy to bare all last night," Cameron said. He let his mallet handler hover an inch from her chest. "Your bodice was down here."
Ainsley cleared her throat. "Low neckline for evening, high for morning."[ ... ]
"This doesn't suit you," Cameron said.
"I can't help the fashion, Lord Cameron."
Cameron poked the top button with his gloved finder. "Undo this."
Ainsley jumped. "What?"
"Unbutton your damned frock."
She nearly choked. "Why?"
"Because I want you to." Cameron's smile spread across his face, slow and sinful, and his voice went low. Dangerous. "Tell me, Mrs. Douglas. How many buttons will you undo for me? — Jennifer Ashley

Progress is a farce because man's head and hand have created wonders that stun the imagination, but his heart does not keep step and his morals undo all that his mind has wrought. — Vance Havner

The world wants you to find extraordinary women threatening. Undo that training. When you feel threatened, it's a great sign that you have just found an ally who will bring you new energy and insight and together you will rise. — Rachel Rosenfelt

I loved her, Eric. So much. And she died. I only get the general sense of things and they pass so quickly, like childhood smells touching you and then being gone on the breeze. But. But but but. It feels strange to be writing this down - I think I believed I could change what happened, undo it, prevent it, save her life somehow after she was already gone. Of course I couldn't. Dead is dead is dead. — Steven Hall

There is no greater paradox in the cosmos," the deceased had written, "than the apparent contradiction of our helplessness ('without me, you can do nothing') alongside God's 'helplessness.' Oh, I know, God is all-powerful, and so on; but he cannot undo what he has done, and what he once did was to make men free. This means that he 'needs' us in order to get us to Heaven as his lovers, and in order to do his will in the world. All we have to do in order to frustrate those wishes - to render God 'helpless' - is to say No. But God is not helpless, really, because he has mercy - himself. And what mercy does is convert, change our hearts. Which God never stops trying to do until we are dead. This means continued suffering for him, which is what Christ is all about." Young — William F. Buckley Jr.

It is the passions that do and undo everything. — Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle

Learn respect for the feeling function: Become aware of and undo some of your (improper) cultural training so that you grant the moods and messages of the heart the same respect that you give the thoughts and ideas of the mind. — Elizabeth Lesser

You can't undo the past, but you can remedy it by creating a better future. — A.D. Posey

Never do what you can't undo until you've considered well what you can't do once you've done it. — Robin Hobb

My dad says stop thinking that way. "You be lookin' backward all the time, Brady, you're gonna have one heck of a crook in the neck." He smiles when he says that. But I know what he means deep down, and it's not funny. You can't keep dwelling on the past when you can't undo it. You can't make it happen any different than it did. — Priscilla Cummings

You can't heal a heart that's been fragmented. But my wounds were closing. Stitch by stitch, I was starting to feel again. I can't undo the past and stop everything that has happened. However, I can try to take a tiny step forward. — Calia Read

You cannot undo the past; you can only learn to live with it, find some way of making peace with it, and move on. — Tabitha Suzuma

You can't undo the past ... but you can certainly not repeat it. — Bruce Willis

I stay in that state of mind for the next couple of days, in the places that only exist in the past. The things you can't undo get lodged in the darkest corners of your mind, where nothing ever seems to get solved, just recycled into new anxiety. — Caroline Burau

I don't have a lot of regrets about the way I've lived my life. Not because I haven't made mistakes - I've made plenty. But what's the point of regret? You can't undo the past. — Cindy Crawford

Sister - if all this is true, what could I do or undo? — Sophocles

I did it because you are a beautiful, desirable woman, and a long time ago, someone made you think you weren't. I'm not saying a few lessons from me can undo everything, but I want you to see a little bit of what I see when I look at you. — Elizabeth Harmon

We seem ambitious God's whole work to undo ... With new diseases on ourselves we war, And with new physic, a worse engine far. — Michel De Montaigne

It is unfair that life doesn't come with a rewind button; an undo button that can reset time after you make a terrible mistake. — Melissa Ford

People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think — Neil Postman

But if you never did anything you couldn't undo you'd end up doing nothing at all. — Anne Tyler

My point is, or should be, simple: history happened. The object is not to undo it, distort it, or to make it fit our present political attitudes. The object of history, which each generation properly interprets anew, is to understand what happened and why. A multicultural Canada can and should look at its past with fresh eyes. It should, for example, study how the Ukrainians came to Canada, how they were treated, how they lived, sometimes suffered, ultimately prospered, and became Canadians. What historians should not do is to recreate history to make it serve present purposes. They should not obscure or reshape events to make them fit political agendas. They should not declare whole areas of the past off-limits because they can only be presented in politically unfashionable terms any more than they should fail to draw object lessons from a past that was frequently less than pleasant and less than honourable. Because the past was not perfect, it must not be made perfect today. — J.L. Granatstein

But there are forces that don't let you turn back and undo things, because to do so would be to deny what is already in motion, to unwrite and erase passages, to shorten the arc of a story you don't own. — Salvador Plascencia

Mortals. I envy you. You think you can change things. Stop the universe. Undo what was done long before you came along. You are such beautiful creatures. — Kami Garcia

Because Trickster is looking to stir things up, to scramble the conventions, to undo history and received notions of what is art and what is not, to sing for his supper, to find and lose himself in the act of entertaining. Trickster haunts the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore. And that is where, if it wants to renew itself in the way that the novel has done so often in its long history, the short story must, inevitably, go. — Michael Chabon

INTRODUCTION The Puzzling Puzzles of Harry Harlow and Edward Deci In the middle of the last century, two young scientists conducted experiments that should have changed the world - but did not. Harry F. Harlow was a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin who, in the 1940s, established one of the world's first laboratories for studying primate behavior. One day in 1949, Harlow and two colleagues gathered eight rhesus monkeys for a two-week experiment on learning. The researchers devised a simple mechanical puzzle like the one pictured on the next page. Solving it required three steps: pull out the vertical pin, undo the hook, and lift the hinged cover. Pretty easy for you and me, far more challenging for a thirteen-pound — Daniel H. Pink

Only with steadfast memories can we now be strong so as to undo the mistakes of the past, to begin anew and build from the rubble of their betrayal ... — F. Sionil Jose

This only is denied even to God: the power to undo the past. — Agathon

If there is one phrase or action that every person on the planet would like to erase from his or her memory or have the chance to undo, it would be, 'Let's do it again.' — Cheech Marin

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree. — Annie Dillard

Diogenes, in his mud-covered sandals, tramps over the carpets of Aristippus. The cynic pullulated at every corner, and in the highest places. This cynic did nothing but saboter the civilisation of the time. He was the nihilist of Hellenism. He created nothing, he made nothing. His role was to undo - or rather to attempt to undo, for he did not succeed in his purpose. The cynic, a parasite of civilisation, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail. What would become of the cynic among a savage people where everyone, naturally and quite seriously, fulfils what the cynic farcically considers to be his personal role? — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

We're weird roman candles burning bright at both ends. At the end of the road's where this story begins. Where the green of the gulf meets the blue of the sea. What makes it all happen is still a mystery to me. But those crazy days and those crazy ways, we never want to undo. We'll be together, now and forever. — Jimmy Buffett

We must distinguish between the kind of structural transformation that would leave in place (even increase) the realities of the exploitation of labor, and one that would undo this kind of exploitation or at least radically reduce it — Immanuel Wallerstein

First rule of restorations. Never do what you can't undo. — Donna Tartt

So distribution should undo excess, and each man have enough. — William Shakespeare

The promises of the future cannot undo the harm of the past. — Sharon Shinn

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us. — Marcel Proust