PAST QUOTES II

quotations about the past

Past quote

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


If the past is not to bind us ... we should have no law but the inclination of the moment.

GEORGE ELIOT

The Mill on the Floss

Tags: George Eliot


That which is past is gone and irrevocable, and wise men have enough to do with things present and to come.

FRANCIS BACON

Essays

Tags: Francis Bacon


From the experience of the past we derive instructive lessons for the future.

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

Inaugural Address, March 4, 1825

Tags: John Quincy Adams


The great times were never as great as they seem in the rearview mirror.

PAT BENATAR

Between a Heart and a Rock Place: A Memoir

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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

Tags: Simone de Beauvoir


All tradition is merely the past.

JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI

Krishnamurti to Himself

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The past is always judged by the present.

NEITH BOYCE

Enemies

Tags: Neith Boyce


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

Tags: Sarah Dessen


There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.

JOYCE CAROL OATES

Zombie

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It is yesterday that makes tomorrow so sad.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

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You can never plan the future by the past.

EDMUND BURKE

letter to a Member of the National Assembly in answer to some objections to his book on French affairs, 1791

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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"

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The past is funny ... it never seems to let things lie, finished. It never seems to stay in place as it should.

KEN KESEY

Sometimes a Great Notion

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The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.

KIRAN DESAI

The Inheritance of Loss


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

Tags: Ralph Waldo Emerson


I don't believe in yesterday, by the way.

JOHN LENNON

interview, Playboy, January 1981

Tags: John Lennon


The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

CASSANDRA CLARE

City of Lost Souls

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We sometimes condemn the present, by praising the past; and show our contempt of what is now, by our esteem for what is no more.

FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

Moral Maxims

Tags: François de La Rochefoucauld


All the strange, checkered past seems to crowd upon my mind.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

speech, February 11, 1861

Tags: Abraham Lincoln