The Past Quotes - Page 3

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.

If you’re searching for a quote that puts your feelings into words – you won’t find it.You can learn every language and read every word ever written – but you’ll never find what’s in your heart.How can you?He has it.

A great mystery lies in the repetition and continuity of the renewal of that which is past. Culture perpetuates itself in memory and the big job is the reawakening of memory.

Why is it that happiness remembered feels like despair?

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

Had I known only tells us the regretful stories of yesterday better

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.

If you cannot hold me in your arms, then hold my memory in high regard.And if I cannot be in your life, then at least let me live in your heart.

I still remember that feeling of walking somewhere confidently, seeing him mid stride and putting my foot down just fine… but feeling like I stumbled.

VIEW FROM A HILLI am not yet quite over it.I am lying down on top of it.Surveying behind me a wastelandOf dried-up promise.While the lights below twinkleWith dull mocking uncertainty.There isn't much left to look forward to,And the looking forward of the past has been belied.

What he had remembered was to tuck among his changes of clothes one of Regan's framed photographs of the four of them from a few summers back, at Lake Winnipesaukee. He set it up on the nightstand, as if he might swim down into the past, where nothing could go wrong.

When I was with him suddenly I wasn’t this broken person anymore.I was just me.I was whole again.I was just a person – like everyone else.

For some, excavating the past isn’t an adventure, it’s more akin to tearing a Band-Aid off an open wound.

Wouldn't the world be a much better place if we didn't make it past the age of maybe 10? Think back to when we were younger, before we were so easily influenced by adults. We rebelled against everything that we now believe is impossible. Super Heroes still existed and we didn't hold grudges because "sorry" was okay and as long as you still wanted to share your toys with me, nothing more needed to be said. Be 10 years old today everyone.

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.

I have seen the poor suffer when nobles seek the purity of ideals. I have seen the powerless die when princes believe in the nostalgia of their dreams. I have seen the common people torn from peace and thrown into war when kings yearn to test the clarity of their vision.

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…

Nostalgia has a way of blocking the reality of the past.

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

The past is for learning from and letting go. You can't revisit it. It vanishes.

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.

In short, the man displayed a constant and insurmountable impulse to wrap himself in a covering, to make himself, so to speak, a case which would isolate him and protect him from external influences. Reality irritated him, frightened him, kept him in continual agitation, and, perhaps to justify his timidity, his aversion for the actual, he always praised the past and what had never existed; and even the classical languages which he taught were in reality for him goloshes and umbrellas in which he sheltered himself from real life.

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

...how time packs new years over the old ones but how those old years are still in there, like the earliest, tightest rings centering a tree, the most hidden, enclosed in darkness and shielded from weather. But then a saw screams in and the tree topples and the circles are stricken by the sun and the sap glistens and the stump is laid open for the world to see.

Every city is a ghost.New buildings rise upon the bones of the old so that each shiny steel bean, each tower of brick carries within it the memories of what has gone before, an architectural haunting. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of these former incarnations in the awkward angle of a street or filigreed gate, an old oak door peeking out from a new facade, the plaque commemorating the spot that was once a battleground, which became a saloon and is now a park.

What if you were wrong? What if everything you ever believed was a lie? What if you missed your opportunity because you didn't know your worth? What if you settled on familiar, but God was trying to give you something better? What if you decided not to go backwards, but forward? What if doing what you have never done before was the answer to everything that didn't make sense? What if the answer wasn't to be found in words, but in action? What if you found the courage to do what you really wanted to do and doing it changed your whole life?

Every relationship that has hit a crossroads has asked, “What is it that you want from me?

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.

When we think carefully about the past, we get to know and understand not just what happened in the past but what really went into things that happened in the past.

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!

I miss that feeling of connection.Knowing he was out there somewhere thinking about me at the same time I was thinking about him.

We long to have again the vanished past, in spite of all its pain.

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

Keep waving someone who has closed his eyes only when you understand the fact that you are only exhausting your energy with the hope that one day he will open his eyes and see you waving him!

Just because The Past always hung there upon its hooks on the game-room wall, you didn't have to pull it down and use it on yourself.

anytime you speak to anybody, remember somebody

how sad and bad and mad it was - but then, how it was sweet

Was she Minh Thuy, finally, or was she Jenny? But the time when there had been a meaningful difference between the two would come to seem like a tiny neighborhood where you couldn't decide which house was yours. Which felt important when you were high above, you thought, in the foothills, but not so much at the truer remove of a continent, where the lives you'd lived and the places you'd come from, dwindled to a single point on the horizon, in the incorrigibly distant past.

The past always wishes to play its part in the unfolding drama of life.

Weakness, like not being able to bury the past. Weakness, like not giving up hope when you know you should.

It is we who move through time, not the reverse. When we walk beyond any one of life’s instants, it becomes nothing more than a receding milestone. We can look back, but we cannot retrace our steps. The past remains stationary, while we are doomed to move ever onwards. To do otherwise is against nature.

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.

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.

I had someone once who made every day mean something.And now…. I am lost….And nothing means anything anymore.

A deceitful man will go as far as to trample all over a woman’s reputation and spirit, in order to prove to his ex-love that he was faithful. The irony, is he is still in love with his ex and the new woman in his life doesn’t even realize it.

…the sad part is, that I will probably end up loving you without you for much longer than I loved you when I knew you.Some people might find that strange.But the truth of it is that the amount of love you feel for someone and the impact they have on you as a person, is in no way relative to the amount of time you have known them.

When one embraces a moment of rapture from the past, either by trying to reclaim it or by refusing to let it go, how can its brightness not tarnish, turn grey with longing and sorrow, until the wild spell of the remembered interlude is lost altogether and the memory of sadness claims its rightful place in the mind? And what is it we expect from the sun-drenched past? There is no formula for re-entry, nothing we can do to enable reconstruction.

anytime you enjoy the sweet fruits of the tree, remember the dirty roots of the tree

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.

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.