quotations about the past
There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.
EUGENE O'NEILL
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A Moon for the Misbegotten
We live in such constant nearness to the abyss of past time that the moment is endlessly sucked into.
JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN
Pulphead
When it comes to the past, EVERYONE writes fiction.
STEPHEN KING
Joyland
You are young ... the past is nothing to you, not even another country as it is to the old, or a nightmare as it is to the guilty.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Bones
A man who denies his past is a man who truly denies himself a future, for he refuses to know himself.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
History-writing is a way of getting rid of the past.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
The past scampers like an alley cat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Atoms of Thought
The past is essentially unknowable: we remake it in our image. Things do not speak for themselves -- we must make them speak.
PAUL MCAULEY
interview, Infinity Plus
If it is justifiable, and even useful and necessary, to turn back to study our past, it is only in order to establish what we have been and what we must no longer be, what we have believed and thought and what we must no longer believe or think, what we have done and what we must do nevermore.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
The past is always a rebuke to the present.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
"Fugitive's Reunion"
We are afraid to dwell upon the past, lest it should retard our future progress; the indulgence of ease is fatal to excellence; and to succeed in life, we lose the ends of being!
WILLIAM HAZLITT
"On the Past and Future", Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners
Evidence about the past is always partial, perspectival, and biased.
GEORGE WECKMAN
"Remembering the past", The Athens Messenger, April 1, 2016
Not heaven itself upon the past has power;
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
JOHN DRYDEN
Imitation of Horace
The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Nova
The past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
The myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
ZADIE SMITH
White Teeth
When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
When then time is passing, it may be perceived and measured; but when it is past, it cannot, because it is not.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
When we look back on our past there is often an element of fiction that enters the picture. The colours seem brighter or darker, the people more delightful or cruel, events are collapsed, mixed and reconfigured. Nevertheless our visions seem utterly convincing, at least to ourselves.
LAETITIA WILSON
"Questions at the heart of identity", The West Australian, April 1, 2016