PAST QUOTES IV
quotations about the past
Our most merciless enemy is our past.
MAXIM GORKY
Untimely Thoughts
I've had a lot of sleepless nights. Nights when I was so worried about something that had happened in the past that I let it dictate my future. We've all been there at some point. You're not alone. I'm talking about those times when we just can't shake the past. Whether it's something small, like making a terrible first impression, or saying something you wish you hadn't, to something big, like having to shutdown your business. Harping on negative experiences is painful and, when we hold on to that pain, we can't move on to something more positive. That's why it's important that you let it go and leave the past behind.
JOHN RAMPTON
"8 Steps to Move Away From the Past You Need to Leave Behind", Entrepreneur, March 11, 2016
See, there's nothing wrong with the past; the past is a good thing, but that's not all there is.
PAT BENATAR
interview, AV Club, August 26, 1997
If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other ... for only out of the past can you make the future.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men
All the past is not worth one today.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"New Year"
But we look ahead to the far off skies,
For the years are flying fast,
And we know that the present that round us lies
Ere the light of a few more moments dies,
Will with many loved and severed ties
Fade into the mist-veiled past.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"The Beautiful Past"
The reverberation often exceeds through silence the sound that sets it off; the reaction occasionally outdoes by way of repose the event that stimulated it; and the past not uncommonly takes a while to happen, and some long time to figure out.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
When I think over the past, I am like a person whose eyes cannot properly measure distances and is liable to think things extremely remote which on examination prove to be quite near.
ANDRE GIDE
If It Die
Life would be no better than candlelight tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
The past was bitter and dry and ashes in his mouth, its bone arms clasped him like some old desiccated lover he could not be shut of.
WILLIAM GAY
Provinces of Night
Keep out of the Past! for its highways
Are damp with malarial gloom;
Its gardens are sere and its forests are drear,
And everywhere moulders a tomb.
Who seeks to regain its lost pleasures,
Finds only a rose turned to dust;
And its storehouse of wonderful treasures
Are covered and coated with rust.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Keep Out of the Past"
An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
Learn to recognize the future the way a Steersman identifies guiding stars and corrects the course of his vessel. Learn from the past; never use it as an anchor.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
It is not that I have no past. Rather, it continually fragments on the terrible and vivid ephemera of now.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Dhalgren
It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.
CHARLES DICKENS
David Copperfield
Beyond here lies nothin'
But the mountains of the past
BOB DYLAN
"Beyond Here Lies Nothin'"
The past is gained, secure, and on record.
ROBERT BROWNING
letter to Elizabeth Barrett, March 1, 1845
How easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Written on the Body
A chorus of voices, the past alive in everything, that sea upon which the present tossed and rode.
WILLIAM GIBSON
All Tomorrow's Parties
The past is as locked in stone as a Jurassic fossil, but by our daily actions, we continuously change the future.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Apocalypse