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QUOTES ON THE PAST

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

The past is a mist.

HAROLD PINTER, Moonlight

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.

NEITH BOYCE, Enemies

What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?

JOHN ASHBERY, "37 Haiku"

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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