PAST QUOTES III
quotations about the past
Our yesterdays
Are like a lonely and a ruined land
Wherein a breeze of recollection sighs--
A fading land to which is no return.
HENRY ABBEY
"Invocation to the Sun"
With each passing moment I'm becoming part of the past. There is no future for me, just the past steadily accumulating.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
The past is a towering mansion.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.
KIRAN DESAI
The Inheritance of Loss
The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.
MAX BEERBOHM
Lytton Strachey
You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.
JODI PICOULT
The Storyteller
Who recollects distinctly his past adventures, knows his destiny to come.
JOHANN CASPAR LAVATER
Aphorisms on Man
It is yesterday that makes tomorrow so sad.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The past is a mist.
HAROLD PINTER
Moonlight
The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.
ÉMILE ZOLA
The Masterpiece
We are products of our past, but we don't have to be prisoners of it.
RICK WARREN
The Purpose Driven Life
Over the trackless past, somewhere,
Lie the lost days of our tropic youth,
Only regained by faith and prayer,
Only recalled by prayer and plaint,
Each lost day has its patron saint!
BRET HARTE
"The Lost Galleon"
I've had a lot of sleepless nights. Nights when I was so worried about something that had happened in the past that I let it dictate my future. We've all been there at some point. You're not alone. I'm talking about those times when we just can't shake the past. Whether it's something small, like making a terrible first impression, or saying something you wish you hadn't, to something big, like having to shutdown your business. Harping on negative experiences is painful and, when we hold on to that pain, we can't move on to something more positive. That's why it's important that you let it go and leave the past behind.
JOHN RAMPTON
"8 Steps to Move Away From the Past You Need to Leave Behind", Entrepreneur, March 11, 2016
Whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners to it.
BARACK OBAMA
speech, June 4, 2009
Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Blood Meridian
A good knowledge of things past is an armour against events to come.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
A long future requires a long past.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Life would be no better than candlelight tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
"Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number--"
If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other ... for only out of the past can you make the future.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men