Past Quotes

“Dear God

Please take away my pain and despair of yesterday and any unpleasant memories and replace them with Your glorious promise of new hope. Show me a fresh HS-inspired way of relating to negative things that have happened. I ask You for the mind of Christ so I can discern Your voice from the voice of my past. I pray that former rejection and deep hurts will not color what I see and hear now.

Help me to see all the choices I have ahead of me that can alter the direction of my life. I ask You to empower me to let go of the painful events and heartaches that would keep me bound. Thank You for Your forgiveness that You have offered to me at such a great price. Pour it into my heart so I can relinquish bitterness hurts and disappointments that have no place in my life. Please set me free to forgive those who have sinned against me and caused me pain and also myself. Open my heart to receive Your complete forgiveness and amazing grace. You have promised to bind up my wounds Psa 147:3 and restore my soul Psa 23:3 .

Help me to relinquish my past surrender to You my present and move to the future You have prepared for me. I ask You to come into my heart and make me who You would have me to be so that I might do Your will here on earth. I thank You Lord for all that’s happened in my past and for all I have become through those experiences. I pray You will begin to gloriously renew my present.”
― Sue Augustine, When Your Past Is Hurting Your Present: Getting Beyond Fears That Hold You Back

“All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality, in attractive and instantly appealing forms.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

“There ain't a man in the world cares about a woman's past until he's thinking of her in his future.”
― Dru Pagliassotti, Clockwork Heart

“Remembrance of the past kills all present energy and deadens all hope for the future”
― Maxim Gorky, Twenty-Six Men and a Girl and Other Stories

“In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points', one can surely only recognise such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“There is only now. And look! How rich we are in it.”
― Vanna Bonta, Shades of the World

“In the past, I always used to be looking for answers. Today, I know there are only questions. So I just live.”
― Sarah Brightman

“You know that old phrase ‘Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it’? Well, I think those who remember the past are even worse off.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“Strange, what brings these past things so vividly back to us, sometimes!”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

“We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“We need falsifications to make the past inhabitable.”
― Frans Kellendonk, Het Complete Werk

“The choices we’re working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we can’t know all the variables; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it’s all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“Every relationship must have a starting point so that past errors may remain in the past.”
― Mary Lydon Simonsen, The Perfect Bride for Mr. Darcy

“Growing up, I always had a soldier mentality. As a kid I wanted to be a soldier, a fighter pilot, a covert agent, professions that require a great deal of bravery and risk and putting oneself in grave danger in order to complete the mission. Even though I did not become all those things, and unless my predisposition, in its youngest years, already had me leaning towards them, the interest that was there still shaped my philosophies. To this day I honor risk and sacrifice for the good of others - my views on life and love are heavily influenced by this.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Every time I hold your hand in the night and look at that star, I remember the fact that it is millions of light years away from us, we are looking at its past and it doesn't exist anymore and I always end up feeling, what if we both are made up of the dust of the same star we are staring at.”
― Akshay Vasu

“Sometimes, Miss Jarmond, it's not easy to bring back the past. There are unpleasant surprises. The truth is harder than ignorance”
― Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah's Key

“If you don’t deal with the past, the past deals with you.”
― Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson, Gone

“The past is called the past for a reason. If you are constantly looking behind you, your eyes aren't on the road ahead. You don't drive the car that way, so why should you live your life that way?”
― Rachel Van Dyken, The Bet

“All I trust is the past. Things that have ended can't betray me.”
― Novala Takemoto, Missin' (Novel)

“Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You'll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I'm still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don't worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.”
― Frank McCourt

“Certainly the heart has always something to tell about the future to those who listen to it. But what does the heart know? Scarce a little of what has already happened. ”
― Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed

“The Past is Experience, Thats All You Got to Learn From.”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers Afield

“A ghost from her past, part of a world to which she no longer belonged but had never stopped missing.”
― Catherine Anderson, Summer Breeze

“When you put a log on the fire, the light and heat you see is, in a literal sense, the decades of sunshine that tree basked in over its lifetime.”
― Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

“In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises.”
― Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic

“Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“Миналото е въпрос на тълкуване. Бъдещето е илюзия. Светът не се движи като по права черта през времето и не върви от миналото към бъдещето. Обратното, времето се движи на безкрайни спирали през и вътре в нас.
Вечността не е безкрайно време, тя е безвремие.
Ако искаш да постигнеш вечно просветление, премахни от съзнанието си миналото и бъдещето и живей в настоящия миг.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“Is that what makes me sad? The eagerness and belief that filled me then and exacted a pledge from life that life could never fulfill?”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“Love is circumstantial; we can love anyone if need be; and losing the one we love is the singular catastrophe. Time does not heal it. Every present moment yearns for even the roughest past.”
― Andrew Solomon

“The past resembles the future more than one drop of water resembles another.”
― Ibn Khaldun