Past Quotes - Page 3

The only real battle in life is between hanging on and letting go.

I couldn't change the past, but hell if I didn't want to be what Kate needed now.

Dont look back , there is a darkness of your past

He who does not know his past cannot make the best of his present and future, for it is from the past that we learn.

The past is no good if you can't learn from it; therefore, no sense in dwelling on it.

For years I lived my life suspended, trapped by the past, unable to move into the future. Like every wounded child I just wanted to turn back time and be in that paradise again, in that moment of remembered rapture where I felt loved, where I felt a sense of belonging. We can never go back. I know that now. We can go forward .We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago, when we were little and had no voice to speak the heart's longing. All the years of my life I thought I was searching for love I found, retrospectively, to be years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of our first love. I was not really ready to love or be loved in the present. I was still mourning--clinging to the broken heart of girlhood, to broken connections. When that mourning ceased I was able to love again.

..the past kept pricking at me and I knew that all the elements of those nineteen days in July were astir within me, like phlegm in an attack of bronchitis, waiting to come up. I had kep them buried all these years, but they were there, I knew, the more complete, the more unforgotten, for being carefully embalmed. Never, never had they seen the light of day; the slightest stirring had been stifled with a scattering of earth.My secret- the explanation of me- lay there. I take myself much too seriously, of course. What does it matter to anyone what I was like, then or now? But every man is important to himself at one time or another; my problem had been to reduce the importance, and spread it out as thinly as I could over half a century. Thanks to my interment policy I had come to terms with life, I had made a working -working was the word - arrangement with it, on the one condition that there should be no exhumation. Was it true, what I sometimes told myself, that my best energies had been given to the undertaker's art? If it was, what did it matter? Should have I acquitted myself better, with the knowledge I had now? I doubted it; knowledge may be power, but it is not resilience, or resourcefulness, or adaptability to life, still less is it instinctive sympathy with human nature; and those where qualities I possessed in 1900 in far greater measure that I possess them in 1952.Prologue, page 16

Every adult grew from a kid who beat the odds. But at different times, in different places, the odds have been appallingly steep.

After so many years, we kept our nearness, by paying with our distance.

Never let the emotions of the past tie you down for your future to slaughter. Resist every opportunity to become angry and you will live a healthier happier life!

Why people use "Was" I have heard some people to say "I was a smart kid at school - Eminem", but why "Was", was is a word for describing the past... which will mean that has started and ended... so what??? How to get it now? You aren't wise, are you?

When Jarod Kintz gets married, I want to wear his grandpa to the ceremony, telling everyone we're Siamese twins from the future-past. Meow.

The past is rich history. The present is sacred inscription. The future is yet to be written.

There's not a day that goes by, without me thinking of you, dying, in someone else's arms.

We weren’t happy together but we lived in a state of easy, mild contentment. We shared everything except the stupid fucking secret hanging round your neck. I imagined tiny photographs: portraits in sepia of your parents, their faces partially obscured by goitres. Meanwhile, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next year, maybe not even in a decade from now but one day: the planet would fall apart.

Sometimes to change a situation you are in requires you to take a giant leap. But, you won't be able to fly unless you are willing to transform.

...The most important thing, I think. You can't run from your past. You have to take it for what it is and realize that it's part of you.

Remember how far you've come, not just how far you have to go. You are not where you want to be, but neither are you where you used to be.

i loved you once but not sure the second will get me back. We know our mistakes and know our past, but we don't know which to blame. these are the last words i will say before we continue our life. Find another lover before you try to love me back.

There is no past, present, or future; there is only meow, right meow, and what you do with your one shot at life.

Into my heart an air that killsFrom yon far country blows:What are those blue remembered hills,What spires, what farms are those?That is the land of lost content,I see it shining plain,The happy highways where I wentAnd cannot come

Life is like a lit cigarette. The past is ashes, the present is burning, and the future is up in smoke. Fast as a breath; inhale exhale.

One minute you are here and the next moment you are some place else, some time a long ago. That is the thing about your mind. Memories. Everything still exists in the folds of your brain; you may try to forget or honestly believe that you have forgotten but nothing is ever erased. Every memory is registered, good or bad does not matter. Sometimes you bring some out on purpose, sometimes some memory jumps at you on its own, shocking you, shaking you, making you realize how far you have come and at the same time proving to you that you can never really go far enough.

Ghosts are everywhere, not just the ghost of Momma in the woods, but ghosts of us too, what we used to be like in those long summers.

Mr. Rawlings is a man of his word. The problem was, he made two different promises and he felt honored to keep them both. He hoped that by fulfilling one, in a different than expected way, he may have the chance to rectify the other.

I felt like I was living two lives. One in the present and one in the past.

The past isn’t always as beautiful as we paint it in our minds.

We need falsifications to make the past inhabitable.

We shouldn't hide behind anger or anonymity when reliving the past because all that’s happened and all those who belong in our past are part of our story.

But I can't rewrite history. I can only live with what's left.

Scars we have today are the constant reminder of our past. They are our auto energizer in our journey toward the future. No need to fear the scars.

To invest into a memory that will only take you down a road that cannot be traveled is futile and counter-productive. It takes us away from the here and now, and it only impedes our well-being when we give nostalgic cadence to this venture.

Learn from the past, he said. Remember it and realize that in a way it is responsible for making you who you are. But also realize that the only you who really matters is who you are right now. That is the you who has the ability to act, to change lives, to do something monumental, and to influence the future you.

I find myself becoming increasingly nostalgic for the past, but after all I suppose that is the only thing one can be nostalgic about.

It's a tiring game resenting the scars and the fearful memories.

Our evolution depends on our memory. If we keep forgetting the mistakes of the past, only to keep repeating them, then we will never change. Humanity will never move forward, spiritually or morally, to become superior beings.

The present contains nothing more than the past and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Since to follow a trail is to remember how it goes, making one's way in the present is itself a recollection of the past...onward movement is itself a return.

It reminded him of the truth—who he really was, and the fact that no matter how far he ran, his past would be right there with him.

Today I am leading because yesterday I was reading.

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.

The past will disappear if we forget we existed".

What I am searching for is the gaps - the silences. This is how I see the past: as an excavation. You sift through the rubble, pick up one fragment here, another there, label it and record where you found it, noting the time and date of discovery. It is not just the foundations I am looking for but something at once more and less tangible.

The past is but an untraceable footfallIt appears in intervals and pushes us back in time,In those moments of grief and then suddenly vanishes.It’s often dark and ruthless.It baffles our thoughts and seizes our peace of mind.By making us recollect our failures, our buried expectationsAnd our shattered dreams It only gives way to fleeting tears, leaving us with fruitless guilt.It wrecks our present and ruins our futureAnd thus should be left where it is meant to beIt should be left behind …

The world around me and my past seem far away and distorted, as if time and space were taffy being stretched and looped and twisted out of shape.

Every time the song looped, all I heard was the part about the lies - and how they weigh you down. Tonight, as I drive toward Detroit in my Jeep, I know what those words really mean. It's not just the lies they're referring to. It's life. You can't run to another town, another place, another state. Whatever it is you're running from - it goes with you. It stays with you until you find out how to confront it.

A poet is born in the present, lives in the past and thinks in the future.

I have noticed over the past three years that most African Christians depend on their pastor or preachers for directions in life than their lecturers, politicians and nurses. That tells why most people refuse certain medical priorities with regards to their pastor's messages. I think if every pastor should have entrepreneurial knowledge coupled with spiritual integrity, Africa will shake!

She stood up. Something inside her had changed. "It was finally time," she thought. It was finally time to leave the past in the past. And move on. She took her first step. It felt like walking for the first time. It was strange to not be chained anymore. It felt like life. Like hope. Like happiness.

The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.

The question is precisely to know whether the past has ceased to exist, or ceased to be useful...

Our past may shape us, but it doesn't define who we become.

I had run to boarding school to escape myself. But I couldn't escape who I was or what I'd done, no matter how fast or far I ran. The crows were just a reminder of that. They wanted back in.My past wasn't done with me.Not yet.

When we hope, we usually hope for the wrong thing.We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it presents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was the progress in it?Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances.

I pushed him against his Jeep, looked him dead in the eye and kissed him. He asked if he could come up, and I just walked up the steps and said, not yet. That was the moment I knew I loved him.

The past should be culled like a box of fresh strawberries rinsed of debris sweetened judiciously and served in small portions not very often.

Even the good things from our pasts still only belonged in the past

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.

I decided I would not go to court to have my mother declared incompetent, I would not fight. I put the car in drive and hit the gas. I felt as if I'd jumped off a sinking ship and was in a life raft with my little girl, my face turned away from the horror, rowing, rowing, as fast and as hard as I could in the opposite direction.

Don’t ever forget you are beautiful, although your life, your past and your present situation may be ugly. You are beautiful.