PAST QUOTES III
quotations about the past
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
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
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"
The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.
MAX BEERBOHM
Lytton Strachey
All tradition is merely the past.
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
Krishnamurti to Himself
Over the trackless past, somewhere,
Lie the lost days of our tropic youth,
Only regained by faith and prayer,
Only recalled by prayer and plaint,
Each lost day has its patron saint!
BRET HARTE
"The Lost Galleon"
You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.
JODI PICOULT
The Storyteller
A good knowledge of things past is an armour against events to come.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The past is a mist.
HAROLD PINTER
Moonlight
The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.
ÉMILE ZOLA
The Masterpiece
It is yesterday that makes tomorrow so sad.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
We are products of our past, but we don't have to be prisoners of it.
RICK WARREN
The Purpose Driven Life
With each passing moment I'm becoming part of the past. There is no future for me, just the past steadily accumulating.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
"Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number--"
Whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners to it.
BARACK OBAMA
speech, June 4, 2009
Who recollects distinctly his past adventures, knows his destiny to come.
JOHANN CASPAR LAVATER
Aphorisms on Man
The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.
KIRAN DESAI
The Inheritance of Loss
You always romanticize the past as soon as the future begins to frighten you.
RICK REMENDER
Uncanny X-Force, No. 16, December 2011
Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Blood Meridian
Life would be no better than candlelight tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch