Top 100 Looking Past Quotes
#1. This time, I felt like I was on the other side of that, looking past duty and worry and rank, seeing the true heart of a person.
And his was so beautiful.
Kiera Cass
#2. -No, the man said, looking past him with his empty gaze, the realm of the dead isn't anything. But to those who have been there, nothing else is anything either.
Par Lagerkvist
#3. I don't believe in looking past anybody - I wouldn't look past the Little Sisters of the Poor after they stayed up all night.
Al McGuire
#4. I was standing with my back to the door, and I saw Connie's eyes go wide. "Be still my heart," Lula said, looking past me, through the window to the sidewalk. I figured they were looking at either Johnny Depp or Ranger. My money was on Ranger.
Janet Evanovich
#5. Looking past the immediate crisis, a more resilient system must be built on stronger and better designed shock absorbers, both in the major institutions and in the infrastructure of the financial system.
Timothy Geithner
#6. It's just me and James walking and walking except he's on my back and his eyes are looking past the people who are looking past us for the coyote of our soul and the wolverine of our heart and the crazy crazy man that touches every Indian who spends too much time alone.
Sherman Alexie
#7. Take the joy and bear the sorrow, looking past your hopes and fears: learn to recognize the measured dance that orders all our years.
Archilochus
#8. The trick was looking past the illusion, because the exit was never as far away as it seemed.
Lauren DeStefano
#9. You can create your own miracle, but you do it by never looking past all the little steps along the way.
Mikaela Shiffrin
#10. When I came back, I wasn't looking past this year. This is a bonus for me. I just wish it would have turned out a little better, but we all don't get what we want all the time.
Vinny Testaverde
#11. You won't find your soul in a textbook, self-help book, or buy it in a store. Sometimes, it's just a matter of looking past the anger, regret, and envy to see its smiling face.
Charles F. Glassman
#12. Trust me, my runners aren't going to run one event while looking past it to the second event. When they get on the line for the 10K, that's a do-or-die situation for them.
Alberto Salazar
#13. Often we want people to pray for us and help us, but we always defeat our object when we look too much to them and lean upon them. The true secret of union is for both to look upon God, and in the act of looking past themselves to Him they are unconsciously united.
A.B. Simpson
#14. I know," I whispered and when he blinked up, his familiar eyes looking past the surface, burning with everything I felt, I was sucked in, and all common sense was gone.
Theresa Paolo
#16. The people setting out on these walks weren't seeking to conquer peaks or test themselves against maps and miles. They were looking for a mystical communion with the land; they walked backwards in time to an imagined past suffused with magical, native glamour:
Helen Macdonald
#17. I didn't think about anything past tomorrow because anything past tomorrow was just like cloud busting - it depended soley on the person looking at the clouds and it could rain any minute.
A.S. King
#18. Sometimes I have problems where I get into a mode where even just looking at a page on a screen makes me panic. And getting past that is a really intense thing to do.
Rachel Swirsky
#19. We passed by a few workers, who did double takes as we ran past. I supposed that the image of a hairless cat in a sweater being followed by a stressed-looking chick in stiletto boots could have been funny. I was too anxious to get the hell out of there to see any humor in it.
Jaye Wells
#20. If you're looking for a deep album or you're looking for me to talk about past situations, it's not even about that. It's just 14 hot records that are gonna make you dance.
Sean Combs
#21. It isn't good to hold on too hard to the past. You can't spend your whole life looking back. Not even when you can't see what lies ahead. All you can do is keep on keeping on, and try to believe that tomorrow will be what it should be - even if it isn't what you expected.
Jim Butcher
#22. ISSERLEY ALWAYS DROVE straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time to size him up. She was looking for big muscles: a hunk on legs. Puny, scrawny specimens were no use to her.
Michel Faber
#23. Question: What is something you sometimes want so badly you'd search for it your whole life? Answer: Your past Warning: Never look for your past. It always comes looking for you.
John Nuck
#24. He was now a husband and father, and they had not been in touch in years, yet she could not pretend that he was not a part of her homesickness, or that she did not often think of him, sifting through their past, looking for portents of what she could not name.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#25. You can't figure out what to do in the future by looking at how you did things in the past
Roger Lewin
#26. I will look at the past, but I will not stare at it.
M. Spio
#27. Desdemona, mourning her parents, was still imprisoned by the past. And so she stood on the mountain, looking down at the emancipated city, and felt cheated by her ability to feel happy by everybody else.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#28. Really. I'm a firm believer in new beginnings. Looking back all the time... It really starts to hurt your neck." He shrugs carelessly. "If you don't want to be defined by your past, you shouldn't have to be.
Karole Cozzo
#29. If you think God looks only one way or sounds only one way or is only one way, you're going to look right past Me night and day. You'll spend your whole life looking for God and not finding Her. Because you're looking for a Him.
Neale Donald Walsch
#30. The past is called the past for a reason. If you are constantly looking behind you, your eyes aren't on the road ahead. You don't drive the car that way, so why should you live your life that way?
Rachel Van Dyken
#31. I've spent the past two years looking for my ex-girlfriend's killer ... but no one will do it.
Anthony Jeselnik
#32. Stop looking forward to things, look inward instead.
Kamand Kojouri
#33. I shall always be grateful for this curious love of history, allowing me to spend a lifetime looking back into the past, allowing me to learn from these large figures about the struggle for meaning for life.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#34. Ive been waiting for this moment,
The one where looking back doesn't seem fascinating anymore & looking forward doesn't seem to be the greatest seek, I am so darn content with creating and living right now that there honestly isn't any room left for the ordinary.
Nikki Rowe
#35. The man held himself still and turned his milk-flooded eyes on her. Fin felt something like vertigo and knew that, though blind, he was seeing. He wasn't looking at her or past her. He was looking into her. And what he saw, he judged.
"Is very good.
A.S. Peterson
#36. But she was looking into the past, trying to understand when it was that all the laughter died.
Sidney Sheldon
#37. She watched the prairies the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below - and she noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer. - Dagny Taggart
Ayn Rand
#38. You may tell by looking at any twig of the forest, ay, at your very wood-pile, whether its winter is past or not.
Henry David Thoreau
#39. But the boy was there, and he was looking at her. That was when Yorda understood what was drawing out her memories of the castle into the boy. It was him. He wanted to know its dark past. He wanted to know everything. No one could stop this. Not even the queen.
Miyuki Miyabe
#40. He took his time looking around for anything interesting to salvage, but found only broken bits of what once was.
A.B. Shepherd
#41. Every time I hold your hand in the night and look at that star, I remember the fact that it is millions of light years away from us, we are looking at its past and it doesn't exist anymore and I always end up feeling, what if we both are made up of the dust of the same star we are staring at.
Akshay Vasu
#42. I don't care too much what happened in the past. I prefer to focus on what is coming next and I am really looking forward to it.
Sebastian Vettel
#43. I realize that life is risks. It's acknowledging the past but looking forward. It's taking a chance that we will
make mistakes but believing that we all deserve to be forgiven.
Carrie Ryan
#44. Family faces are magic mirrors. Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present and future.
Gail Buckley
#45. Society, magazines, posters, music videos, investment bankers. A lot of times, in my past anyway, looking within wasn't overly encouraged. Pretty much everybody proclaimed that fame would give me power and fortune.
Alanis Morissette
#46. The past could destroy you, sink its teeth deep and rip out your heart... Or your soul. She didn't know what was worse. But she knew damn well the man waiting in her office could do both. She wasn't looking forward to facing her past.
Heather R. Blair
#47. The present joys of life we doubly taste,
By looking back with pleasure to the past.
Martial
#48. Peacefully and lovingly accepting who we are today requires honestly looking at our past.
Rob Martin
#49. You know what is wrong about always searching for answers about something that happened in your past ? It keeps you from looking forward. It distracts you from what's in front of you, Ya. Your future.
Ika Natassa
#50. If any one be in rapture with his own knowledge, looking only on those below him, let him but turn his eye upward towards past ages, and his pride will be abated, when he shall there find so many thousand wits that trample him under foot.
Michel De Montaigne
#51. In his arms I've finally found the place I've been looking for, where fear can't touch me, where memories can't reach, where the past is forgotten and the present is enough. Where the present is, in fact, all that matters.
Sarah Alderson
#52. Roger edged past the chief, only just avoiding pushing him with his shoulder. The yelling ceased, and Samneric lay looking up in quiet terror. Roger advanced upon them as one wielding a nameless authority.
William Golding
#53. As children, as we learn what things are, we are slowly learning to dismiss them visually. As adults, entirely submerged in words and concepts, we spend almost all of our time thinking and worrying about the past and the future, hardly ever looking at or engaging with the world visually.
Chris Ware
#54. Wilhelm's smile reminded Harry of his father's sad, resigned smile, the smile of a man looking backwards because that's where the things that made him smile were.
Jo Nesbo
#55. Dagny," he said, looking at the city as it moved past their taxi window, "think of the first man who thought of making a steel girder. He knew what he saw, what he thought and what he wanted. He did not say, 'It seems to me,' and he did not take orders from those who say, 'In my opinion.
Ayn Rand
#56. Americans as no one else in the Old World are looking ahead and are future-minded without the limitations of traditions and can look ahead without the burdens of the past.
Jurgen Moltmann
#57. The past is a stronger influence in the South. But I think everywhere you have this sense that the world changes faster than you can accommodate yourself to. Looking back and seeing how you got where you are is a useful way to combat disorientation.
Charles Frazier
#58. As a former English major, I am a sitting duck for Gift Books, and in the past few years I've gotten Dickens, Thackeray, Smollet, Richardson, Emerson, Keats, Boswell and the Brontes, all of them Great, none of them ever read by me, all of them now on a shelf, looking at me and making me feel guilty.
Garrison Keillor
#59. In the past 40 years, the United States lost more than a million farmers and ranchers. Many of our farmers are aging. Today, only nine percent of family farm income comes from farming, and more and more of our farmers are looking elsewhere for their primary source of income.
Tom Vilsack
#60. I'm looking into my past lives. I'm convinced some of them still owe me money.
Graham Parke
#61. You can't change the past. It's already done. Looking back only keeps you there.
Donna Grant
#62. I lost my father this past year, and the word feels right because I keep looking for him. As if he were misplaced. As if he could just turn up, like a sock or a set of keys.
Mark Slouka
#63. Looking again at the lights and the shadows, in both one's own life and in the history of the past century, gives a person perspective to face the end of life on earth in the light of eternity.
Francis George
#64. I know the microphones and cameras are on me. They're looking at my gestures and taking it and running with it because of things that have happened in the past. It's very unfair.
Terrell Owens
#65. Someone once told me that digging up the past has two sides: The pro is that you remember things you had forgotten about. Unfortunately, the con is the exact same thing. That may scare some people away, might force them to always be moving forward, never looking back, not for a second.
Pete Wentz
#66. You end up at the destination you fix your eyes on: look to the future and you'll get there, keep looking at the past, and you'll find yourself back where you started.
Julie Johnson
#67. Kitsch evokes a future utopia looking back at a past that is selectively (mis)remembered, thereby helping to stabilize the present toward which kitsch is otherwise deeply anatagonistic.
Theodor Adorno
#68. I'll never stop dreaming that one day we can be a real family, together, all of us laughing and talking, loving and understanding, not looking at the past but only to the future.
LaToya Jackson
#69. Einstein theorized that time travel was possible, but he was looking at it as unidirectional, going forward. Traveling into the past is much more problematic, as countless stories have demonstrated!
Kelley Armstrong
#70. Have you ever felt you were born in the wrong decade, or came just a bit too late and missed out on all the good stuff when it was in its heyday?
E.A. Bucchianeri
#71. If tomorrow will be the end of the world, I will spend my today by looking at the pictures of my past!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#72. Whose best and most fruitful gift was the power of admiration, which made it possible for me to learn. Now, as in my youth, I am looking up to the truly great creations of the past, which I see high above my own and which alone deserve the name of greatness.
Thomas E. Mann
#73. If you're always looking back at what you've lost, you'll never discover the treasure that lies just up ahead.
J.E.B. Spredemann
#74. The whole Obama phenomenon brings up memories from my distant past: the good-looking guy who talks real good, whose line you don't buy immediately but whose charm is so dazzling that he gradually convinces you that this time it will be different.
Marianne Williamson
#75. I do my precalc homework, and then when I'm done I actually sit with the textbook for like three hours and try to understand what I just did. That's the kind of weekend it is
the kind where you have so much time you go past the answers and start looking into the ideas.
John Green
#76. No [Peter] Pan has ever survived past puberty. When their bodies start changing, they start looking for the rope and the razor blades. There are some betrayals of the flesh that they simply aren't designed to endure.
Seanan McGuire
#77. In the past it would take you weeks, if not months, to identify how Iranian activists connect to each other. Now you know how they connect to each other by looking at their Facebook page. KGB ... used to torture in order to get this data.
Evgeny Morozov
#78. 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.
Thomas Christopher Greene
#79. The sadness in your heart is a yesterday you can no longer see, so put it behind you and walk always forward.
Swift Antelope to Amy in Comanche Heart
Catherine Anderson
#80. I'm definitely in a place where I'm looking for different than what I've done in the past, just so I can go to work and do something I haven't done before.
Kimberly Elise
#81. An entire tree swept past the door, upside down, its roots sprouting upward like horns. "You see that?" "Yeah. It's gonna wake up in the middle of the ocean, say, 'Wait a second. This isn't right.' "'I'm supposed to be over there.' "'Took me years to get that hill looking the way I wanted it.
Dennis Lehane
#82. He answered his own question. He did not seem upset. He seemed puzzled, as if looking back at his past self and wondering how he could possibly have been so stupid.
You're nothing special.
Sarah Rees Brennan
#83. Longing for the past keeps us looking back; but hoping in a brighter future keeps us looking up! EL
Evinda Lepins
#84. Can space break? I mean the space of art galleries. Over the past 100 years, art galleries have gone from looking like Beaux Arts salons to simple storefronts to industrial lofts to the gleaming giant white cubes of Chelsea with their shiny concrete floors.
Jerry Saltz
#85. Architecture should be rooted in the past, and yet be part of our own time and forward looking.
Moshe Safdie
#86. But now, the final feeling ... is one of gratitude that the journey was undertaken. Looking at the past has meant, for the first time, being able to let it go.
Ruth Cracknell
#87. The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.
Kiran Desai
#88. I have no intention of retaliating or looking backwards. We are going to forget the past and look forward to the future.
Jomo Kenyatta
#89. Sometimes it's like that in life too. We look into a past that no longer exists, looking as if it's real. We hold onto things in our life that there's no reason to hold onto anymore because, unlike the stars, they don't bring us beauty, they bring us pain.
Charlene Carr
#90. I'm looking forward to the future, and feeling grateful for the past.
Mike Rowe
#91. I like what I see when I'm looking at me when I'm walking past the mirror,
Mary J. Blige
#92. I understand true life doesn't happen when I constantly gaze backwards, mulling over all the injustices others have done or I have done to others.
Mary E. DeMuth
#93. When people lost hope, they looked in the last place they remembered having it, and it was always in the past. Maybe someday they'd stop looking to the past to find their hope and start looking at one another, where hope really lived.
Tiffany Reisz
#94. Have you ever had the sensation of looking at someone for the first time and ever so quickly the past and future seem to fuse ? Does that not mean something ? That we felt so much, so deeply, before even speaking?
Charles Dickens
#95. Hope resides in the future, while perspective and wisdom are almost always found by looking to the past.
Greg Mortenson
#96. Looking at the past is like lolling in a rocking chair. It is so relaxing and you can rock back and forth on the porch, and never go forward.
Martha Graham
#97. I do not like to dwell on the past. Life is ahead of us. If we spend too much time looking backward, we can't see where we are going!
R.J. Palacio
#98. If you're really looking for answers, look past me. But if you're interested in how I got to where I am, I will be as honest as possible.
Rich Mullins
#99. Tiffany was not afraid of heights at all. She could walk past tall trees without batting an eyelid. Looking up at huge towering mountains didn't bother her a bit.
What she was afraid of, although she hadn't realized it up until this point, was depths.
Terry Pratchett
#100. You're taught from the day you start medical school that you're a god, that you can have power over life and death. So when your life starts to crumble, and the highest power you see is looking back in the mirror - and you know that power is flawed - it is very hard to get past that.
Michael Palmer
