PAST QUOTES III
quotations about the past
A long future requires a long past.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me ... all that's left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears - I shall not find myself.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
Old Age
Time wasn't a thing you could divide easily; there was no defined middle or beginning or end. I could pretend to leave the past behind, but it would not leave me.
SARAH DESSEN
Just Listen
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"
The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.
KIRAN DESAI
The Inheritance of Loss
Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging up your back and running its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do--the only thing--is run.
LAUREN OLIVER
Delirium
And that past is ever present,
Ever present in my heart,
Filling it with sweetest love-thoughts,
As I tread the world's wide mart.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
Thoughts
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
A good knowledge of things past is an armour against events to come.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Blood Meridian
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
Who recollects distinctly his past adventures, knows his destiny to come.
JOHANN CASPAR LAVATER
Aphorisms on Man
You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.
JODI PICOULT
The Storyteller
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's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.
CHARLES DICKENS
David Copperfield
Whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners to it.
BARACK OBAMA
speech, June 4, 2009
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"
The past is such a curious creature,
To look her in the face
A transport may reward us,
Or a disgrace --
EMILY DICKINSON
"The past is such a curious creature"
We are products of our past, but we don't have to be prisoners of it.
RICK WARREN
The Purpose Driven Life