PAST QUOTES III
quotations about the past
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
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"
And that past is ever present,
Ever present in my heart,
Filling it with sweetest love-thoughts,
As I tread the world's wide mart.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
Thoughts
The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.
MAX BEERBOHM
Lytton Strachey
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"
A good knowledge of things past is an armour against events to come.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.
KIRAN DESAI
The Inheritance of Loss
You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.
JODI PICOULT
The Storyteller
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
Whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners to it.
BARACK OBAMA
speech, June 4, 2009
The past is a mist.
HAROLD PINTER
Moonlight
Who recollects distinctly his past adventures, knows his destiny to come.
JOHANN CASPAR LAVATER
Aphorisms on Man
The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.
ÉMILE ZOLA
The Masterpiece
We are products of our past, but we don't have to be prisoners of it.
RICK WARREN
The Purpose Driven Life
Life would be no better than candlelight tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
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
It is yesterday that makes tomorrow so sad.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.
CHARLES DICKENS
David Copperfield