Best 201 quotes in «the past quotes» category

I told her I was not sure I could bear living with memories, she said, Look up at the stars, look, they are not there, what you see is the memory of what once was, once upon a time.

It’s not a crime to wish for other worlds. You’ll get taxed for it but they can’t throw you in jail for creating your own private world…yet. Dramatics are fun, an indulgence. ‘You can’t go backward,’ ‘You can’t live in the past,’ they tell you. Why not? ‘You’ve got to put all that behind you and move on to other things,’ they say. Bullshit! These are all expressions of modern disposability. It’s a mediocritizing technique—trying to get rid of what I call ‘past orthodoxies.’ It’s our past that makes us unique, therefore it’s our past that economic interests want to rob from us, so they can sell us a new, improved future. Society now depends on a disposable world—out with the old, in with the new, including relationships. But how we weep and wish we could hold onto those cherished moments forever, to those long-whispered dreams, those tortured nights—how we want to grasp them and stop them from sifting through our fingers. I say, ‘Don’t let it happen. Keep things the way you want them and let the rest of the world be duped.

It takes just one day to remember one day! Mind today, for one day, you shall remember one day

It turns out that sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you're alone. It feels less like a wound and more like a poultice.

It was revolting that I had been like that. Shameful. Disgraceful, in the old-time sense of the word. And what was even worse? That I could now see myself so wretchedly clearly. I had changed, I recognized bitterly.I hated that I could see myself as I was. What a terrible thing to know. I would never be able to not know it, to forget it.I didn't see how I could ever forgive River for that.

It was too late to think about what could have been or what should have been. What’s done is done. The past was in the past and there was no changing it.

I understand, Bill. Because I tell myself a lot of stories to help me sleep at night. Stories about how Babe was my dearest friend, and I never betrayed her. Stories about how you and I had a great love, not just an occasional roll in the hay whenever she was out of town. Stories about how wonderful life was back then, when none of us told each other the truth, but so what? It was all so beautiful, wasn’t it? It was all so lovely and gracious. Not like it is now.

I used to play a game where I imagined that someone had abandoned me in a strange place & I had to find my way back home-I thought I could do it blind, the same way a lost dog might trek a thousand miles to return to its owner, relying on some mysterious instinct that drew the heart back to where it belonged.

I was haunting you, for so long, that I forgot that I became a ghost too.

Little is the imagination of the person who believes that the future of another may be determined by his/her past. We are so much more than our minds and our memories! We are in fact transcendent souls. If you determine what is ahead by what you can see when you look back, then you will in fact never behold what actually stands in front of you.

Living in the past is a place that has no future.

It’s the intricate details you miss the most. For me, it’s the soft lines around the eyes when he smiles… Or that look he gave me sometimes that I cannot begin to describe - but I would know it if I saw it again. It was the look that gave him away. I’d know that look anywhere… It used to be my everything.

Memories are a nice place to visit, but a terrible place to live.

MOTHER TIME: Life goes by so very fast, my dears, and taking the time to reflect, even once a year, slows things down. We zoom past so many seconds, minutes, hours, killing them with the frantic way we live that it's important we take at least this one collective sigh and stop, take stock, and acknowledge our place in time before diving back into the melee. Midnight on New Year's Eve is a unique kind of magic where, just for a moment, the past and the future exist at once in the present. Whether we're aware of it or not, as we countdown together to it, we're sharing the burden of our history and committing to the promise of tomorrow.

My youth is like a scab: under it there is a wound that every day leaks blood. It disfigures me.

My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I’d been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been.

It's only awkward if it matters.

Long after the poor departed have gone from our hearts, their insignificant dust continues to be mingled, to be used as an alloy, with the events of the past.

Mindfulness is the extremely difficult art of leaving the past and the future alone.

MOTHER TIME: The past is always with us, dear, for better or worse. It is what it is and you can't change it. All you can do is learn how to live with it in the present.

Never swim in a rough sea, dear boy, this sea's a killer. But the past refused to come back, as it did in dreams, to be remade. Titus walked in my dreams in the brightness of his youth, which was now made eternal. Or else I dreamed that he was dead and felt joy on waking.

No matter how much you stress or obsess about the past or future, you can't change either one. In the present is where your power lies.

My dear, you never will understand time, will you? You're always trying to be the things you were, instead of the person you are tonight. Why do you save those ticket stubs and theater programs? They'll only hurt you later. Throw them away, my dear.

Nothing is deader than yesterday's news.

Nothing helps a man to reform like thinking of the past with regret.

Nature is an inherently forward beast; footsteps disappear, past hurts fade.

Of course we live in dreams and by dreams, and even in a disciplined spiritual life, in some ways especially there, it is hard to distinguish dream from reality. In ordinary human affairs humble common sense comes to one's aid. For most people common sense is moral sense. But you seem to have deliberately excluded this modest source of light. Ask yourself, what really happened between whom all those years ago? You've made it into a story, and stories are false.

Once there was magic, wandering free in roads of sky and paths of sea and in that timeless long gone hour words of nonsense still had power doors still flew and birds still talked witches grinned and giants walked we had magic wands and magic wings and we lost our hearts to impossible things Unbelievable thoughts, unsensible ends for wizards and warriors might be friends. In a world where impossible things are true, I don't know why we forgot the spell when we lost the way how the forest fell but now we are old, we can vanish too. And I see once more the invisible track that will lead us home and take us back so find your wands and spread your wings I'll sing your love of impossible things and when you take my vanished hand, we'll both go back to that magic land where we lost our hearts several lifetimes ago when we were wizards, once.

Our identities are tremendously warped and distorted by yesterday's trauma and tomorrow's expectations.

Remembering something from the past? you are creating it right now as evidence for who you are now.

October air, complete with dancing leaves and sighing winds greeted him as he stepped from the bus onto the dusty highway. Coolness embraced. The scent of burning wood hung crisp in the air from somewhere far in the distance. His backpack dropped in a flutter of dust. He surveyed dying cornfields from the gas station bus stop. Seeing this place, for the first time in over twenty years, brought back a flood of memories, long buried and forgotten.

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. The events that cause them can never be forgotten, can they?

She considers the past. She measures it and weighs it and holds it in her hand like a plum. The past is everything now, and she understands that this is what it means to be dying: You stop looking forward, instead living for moments that happened years before.

Rivers are lucky. They can only move forward.

Perhaps the echoes of people we once loved still linger in the places we frequented with them and that is why we go back… Not so much to remember them as to feel them…

She didn't want to forget how deeply she had loved him, how important it had been to her; she felt as if to discard the memory would be a betrayal of her younger self.

She lay awake for many hours into the night, among her trunks and trinkets. She glanced over at the neat stacks of materials and toys and opera plumes and said, aloud, "Does it really belong to me?" Or was it the elaborate trick of an old lady convincing herself that she had a past? After all, once a time was over, it was done. You were always in the present. She may have been a girl once, but was not now. Her childhood was gone and nothing could fetch it back.

She used to wander through the past as often as it beckoned her, bemoaning the loss of nostalgia. Then, for a while, she turned from it, blissfully free of its noxious clutch, and now it's back, taunting her with what she left behind, knowing she can never recapture what's gone.

Some of our friends are our friends only because we used to be friends.

Take a moment in between breaths to let yourself see what's left to be seen, all the places you've been. Your old haunts. I pass by them every day, and after all these years I'll find myself wondering if they're just facades, like the saloon fronts and gun shops of an old ghost town set. As if I can poke my head inside the doors in the light of day and see nothing but framed out rooms and sandy floors, existing for no other reason than to give structure to who I used to be.

Some people masturbate to temporarily replace their partners when they are absent, whereas some people do that to temporarily live in the present.

Sometimes in life, you may take a step, only to realize the steps you missed. Sometimes in life, you may delay a step taking, only to see a step you shouldn’t have miss. Notwithstanding the results of your steps, you still ought to take steps. Life keeps moving and you can’t afford to be static! Keep on moving on!

Sometimes you have to forgive the present moment for not living up to your past expectations of what your future would look like.

That was your past, Michelle. You can't live in the past. Sure you can, Sean. If you're not too thrilled with your future.

She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic.

The day history will die and lose its essence with time, memories will not only die, but they shall also surely be forgotten with time!

That love all belonged to the elapsed moment.

The Englishman left months ago, Hana, he's with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit.

The amusement park was our best invention; the museum our worst.

The nostalgia of a moment's love can be an illusionary precipice from which we fall from truth; in heartbreak, what we escape to in the past is what tortures us in the present.