Past Quotes

“On the Acropolis, he’d thought she’d seen too much sun for a woman but in the courtyard, under the moon, her face, neck, and arms were as pale as the moon goddess. Allowing himself to imagine it was the moon goddess leading him upward was a way of climbing to the second story.”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“I’ll tell you another secret, this one for your own good. You may think the past has something to tell you. You may think that you should listen, should strain to make out its whispers, should bend over backward, stoop down low to hear its voice breathed up from the ground, from the dead places. You may think there’s something in it for you, something to understand or make sense of.
But I know the truth: I know from the nights of Coldness. I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It’s hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone.
Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging at your back and running its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do—the only thing—is run.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“The 'what should be' never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no 'what should be,' there is only what is.”
― Lenny Bruce

“She needs a new journal. The one she has is problematic. To get to the present, she needs to page through the past, and when she does, she remembers things, and her new journal entries become, for the most part, reactions to the days she regrets, wants to correct, rewrite.”
― Dave Eggers, How the Water Feels to the Fishes

“Without realizing that the past is constantly determining their present actions, they avoid learning anything about their history. They continue to live in their repressed childhood situation, ignoring the fact that is no longer exists, continuing to fear and avoid dangers that, although once real, have not been real for a long time.”
― Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

“There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don't find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.”
― J.M. Barrie, Works of J. M. Barrie. (20+ Works) Includes Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, The Little Minister, What Every Woman Knows and more

“Well we've left behind the 200X's, and we move onto the 20XX's. Maybe that will finally make us feel like we're living in the future, rather than a media controlled slave state where an iPhone is worth substantially more than a human life. Happy new year.”
― Yahtzee Croshaw

“If my twelve-year-old self, of whom I had grown rather fond, thinking about him, were to reproach me: 'Why have you grown up such a dull dog, when I gave you such a good start? Why have you spent your time in dusty libraries, catologuing other people's books instead of writing your own? What had become of the Ram, the Bull and the Lion, the example I gave you to emulate? Where above all is the Virgin, with her shining face and curling tresses, whom I entrusted to you'- what should I say?

I should have an answer ready. 'Well, it was you who let me down, and I will tell you how. You flew too near to the sun, and you were scorched. This cindery creature is what you made me.'

To which he might reply: 'But you have had half a century to get over it! Half a century, half the twentieth century, that glorious epoch, that golden age that I bequeathed to you!'

'Has the twentieth century,' I should ask, 'done so much better than I have? When you leave this room, which I admit is dull and cheerless, and take the last bus to your home in the past, if you haven't missed it - ask yourself whether you found everything so radiant as you imagined it. Ask yourself whether it has fulfilled your hopes. You were vanquished, Colston, you were vanquished, and so was your century, your precious century that you hoped so much of.”
― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

“My past is trying to catch up to me and I must continue run from it. It's the only way I can live.”
― Nicole Sobon, Program 13

“Memory is a tough place. You were there.”
― Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

“I know he says it’s a mind upload problem,” said Aideen. “But we won’t know that for sure until we get there. And maybe not even then if he restricts our access to the outside world of 2253.”
― Steven Decker, Time Chain

“When we put things off until some future-probably mythical-Laterland, we drag the past into the future. The burden of yesterday's incompletions is a heavy load to carry. Don't carry it.”
― Peter McWilliams

“To dream the future is much more better than to regret the past.
But the best of all, to live in the present life with all of your power.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“I still preserve those relics of past sufferings and experience, like pillars of witness set up in travelling through the valve of life, to mark particular occurrences. The footsteps are obliterated now; the face of the country may be changed; but the pillar is still there, to remind me how all things were when it was reared.”
― Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey

“The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be...”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Fair as the moon and joyful as the light;
Tot wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim; Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dreams.”
― Christina Rossetti

“You can't change where you came from, but you can change where you go from here.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake

“At times it may seem as though you and your past are one. Sometimes we fail to differentiate between what has happened to us and who we are today. If you have a hard time getting beyond that damaging mind-set let me encourage you right now. You are not your past Although you are changed and shaped by past experiences who you were yesterday does not control the person you have the potential to become tomorrow.”
― Sue Augustine, When Your Past Is Hurting Your Present: Getting Beyond Fears That Hold You Back

“In the space between yes and no, there is a lifetime. It’s the difference between the path you walk and one you leave behind; it’s the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; it’s the legroom for the lies you will tell yourself in the future.”
― Jodi Picoult, Change of Heart

“We are all a little schizophrenic. Each of us has three different people living inside us every day—who you were, who you are and who you will become. The road to sanity is to recognize those identities, in order to know who you are today.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Let the past be content with itself, for man needs forgetfulness as well as memory”
― James Stephens, Irish Fairy Tales

“After his experience with Minos, Nico realized that most spectres held only as much power as you allowed them to have. They pried into your mind, using fear or anger or longing to influence you. Nico had learned to shield himself. Sometimes he could even turn the tables and bend ghosts to his will.”
― Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus

“Around two or three times a year, we would notice the wind blowing harder than usual, which meant a giant wave was coming.”
― Steven Decker, Addicted to Time

“Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly?”
― Diane Setterfield, Bellman & Black

“What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.”
― Graham Swift, Waterland

“One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe — and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives — is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“Atonement was powerful; it was the lock on the door you closed against the past.”
― Stephen King, The Green Mile

“Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Errand

“We use time machines to learn from the past,” Chris continued. “But there are still a few things that have been puzzling some of us, and maybe you can help clear up one of them. There’s a person called Kim Kardashian—someone born in your time, I believe. She has had thousands of regeneration and cybernetic enhancement procedures. But no one can seem to recall her purpose. Does she have any special talent or reason for being kept alive all these centuries?”
Heads shook in bafflement.
“Anyway,” said Chris, “you’ll be glad to know that Tom Brady is still slinging footballs as far as ever. And Brett Favre is considering another comeback.”
― Steve Bates, Back To You