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The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too.
EUGENE O'NEILL, Long Day's Journey Into Night
There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.
EUGENE O'NEILL, A Moon for the Misbegotten
The past lies like a nightmare upon the present.
KARL MARX, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.
WILLIAM GOLDING, New York Times, Oct. 7, 1983
It's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.
LEWIS CARROLL, Alice in Wonderland
You can never plan the future by the past.
EDMUND BURKE, letter to a Member of the National Assembly
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
GEORGE ORWELL, Nineteen Eighty-Four
past moments old dreams back again or fresh like those that pass or things things always and memories I say them as I hear them murmur them in the mud
SAMUEL BECKETT, How It Is
- Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms,
- Our echoes die in that corridor and now
- I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
- Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons.
SEAMUS HEANEY, The Underground
All tradition is merely the past.
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI, Krishnamurti to Himself
I think we all agree, the past is over.
GEORGE W. BUSH, Dallas Morning News, May 10, 2000
The past is always judged by the present.
What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?
I don't believe in yesterday, by the way.
JOHN LENNON, Playboy interview, Jan. 1981
The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
H.G. WELLS, The Discovery of the Future
The past was another country and one which the movement of time's tectonic plates pulled further away every year.
MICHAEL MARSHALL, The Upright Man
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
- All is now secure and fast;
- Not the gods can shake the Past;
- Flies-to the adamantine door
- Bolted down forevermore.
- None can reënter there,--
- No thief so politic,
- No Satan with a royal trick
- Steal in by window, chink, or hole,
- To bind or unbind, add what lacked,
- Insert a leaf, or forge a name,
- New-face or finish what is packed,
- Alter or mend eternal Fact.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, The Past
Nothing's ever done.... No matter what you do, or what you pretend, the past is there. You can't ignore it.
JOHN SAUL, When the Wind Blows
The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.
ECKHART TOLLE, The Power of Now
All the strange, checkered past seems to crowd upon my mind.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, speech, Feb. 11, 1861
Whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners to it.
BARACK OBAMA, speech, Jun. 4, 2009
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