Top 100 Old Past Quotes
#1. Make me forget. Make me happy. Make me want this new future more than I want my old past.
J.A. Huss
#2. History is not just a tale of men's making, but is a thing tied to the land. We call a hill by the name of a hero who died there, or name a river after a princess who fled beside its banks, and when the old names vanish, the stories go with them and the new names carry no reminder of the past.
Bernard Cornwell
#4. Another factor that seems to me to be equally important is the great myth and rationale of 'the modern,' that it places dynamite at the foot of old error and levels its shrines and monuments. Contempt for the past surely accounts for a consistent failure to consult it.
Marilynne Robinson
#5. Wanderlove is about forgetting the bad things and focusing on the good. Out with the old and in with the new ... The only way to escape the past is to keep moving forward.
Kirsten Hubbard
#6. I cannot think of a thing that was better in those good old days.
Rose Schneiderman
#7. Elvis was just like a big old kid. It was like he never got past 19, I don't think, in a lotta ways.
Mac Davis
#8. If I look at my old lyrics, they seem to be full of rage, but empty. There was an emptiness in my life.
Green Day
#9. With apologies to all my past boyfriends, I never loved a man the way I loved my old apartment.
Jami Attenberg
#10. Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.
Peter Thiel
#11. Young men, trust God, and make the future bright with blessing. Old men, trust God, and magnify him for all the mercies of the past.
Charles Spurgeon
#12. The new is a guest in the house of the old.
Marty Rubin
#13. No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun - for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax - This won't hurt
Hunter S. Thompson
#14. That the past is one lie, and the memory has no returning, becouse every old spring is beyond retrieve, and even the craziest and most persistent love is just a temporary truth ...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#15. New York has never learnt the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs.
Michel De Certeau
#16. In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived.
Knut Hamsun
#17. Young men speak about the future because they have no past, and old men speak of the past because they have no future.
Boyd K. Packer
#18. The young should not think of themselves as immature and the elderly need not view themselves as feeble. Our minds control our bodies. Have no age, transcend both past and future, and enter into naka-ima - the eternal present.
H.E. Davey
#19. After voluntary exertions on the part of our people to which the history of the world furnishes no parallel, is the old root of bitterness still to remain in the ground, to sprout and bear fruit in the future as it has borne fruit in the past?
Robert Dale Owen
#20. They travel through the heartland, past cold factories and drifty towns, to the old, old mountains slumbering east of Tennessee.
Sarah Sullivan
#21. Northern Ireland still suffers from its past, and it will take generations to escape sectarianism and for violence to end totally. Nonetheless, it is in a different place now than during the Troubles, and it will not go back to the old days.
Jonathan Powell
#22. Old movies are black-and-white; they've got good guys and bad guys. The thing was, I didn't want to live in the past anymore. It was time for my life to go full color.
Eileen Cook
#23. I feel some unwillingness to quit the remembrance of the past. With all the hope of the new I feel that we are leaving the old.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#24. She wasn't just old, not anymore. She'd sailed right past old and into the port called Decrepitude.
Richard Gleaves
#25. For when an old man relives his life, he lives it only by dwelling upon his memories; and when wisdom in an old man has outgrown the immediate impressions of life, the past viewed from the quiet of memory is something different from the present in all its bustle. The
Soren Kierkegaard
#26. In old grimy streets, in isolated and decaying houses, sometimes far from the Vieux Carre, in little used and secluded cemeteries, there still sluggishly circulates the ebbing blood of the past, of a vigorous and vividly hued past.
Clarence John Laughlin
#27. When you're young, you wish for things in the future, but when you grow old ... you wish for things from the past to
Lorraine Heath
#28. In the old house, the past hung in the air like motes of dust waiting to be illuminated by the sharp rays of memory
John Connolly
#29. Resentment and bitterness and old grudges were dead things, which rotted the hands that grasped them.
Winston Graham
#30. While they talked they remembered the years of their youth, and each thought of the other as he had been at another time.
John Edward Williams
#31. The young readers I have interacted with carry old concerns repackaged in the skin of a new generation: puzzlement over continuous national moral failings, contradictions with the elders, nostalgia for a nonexistent Kenyan past.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
#32. When we leave our child in nursery school for the first time, it won't be just our child's feelings about separation that we will have to cope with, but our own feelings as well-from our present and from our past, parents are extra vulnerable to new tremors from old earthquakes.
Fred Rogers
#33. One's own yesterday is a ghost that will not be laid down.
Glen Cook
#34. But Alfred could not live long. He was already an old man, well past forty years, and now he was looking to the future. He
Bernard Cornwell
#35. An old man's beliefs matter little. I am the past. You, the future. What are your beliefs?
Guillermo Del Toro
#36. I can't talk about every single film I made. It's not my way to go back into the past and to look at my old pictures and to discuss them.
Otto Preminger
#37. The present is an age of talkers, and not doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and doat on past achievements.
William Hazlitt
#38. So different are the colours of life, as we look forward to the future, or backward to the past; and so different the opinions and sentiments which this contrariety of appearance naturally produces, that the conversation of the old and young ends generally with contempt or pity on either side.
Victor Hugo
#39. Your life was a hypothesis. Those who die old are made of the past. Thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities.
Edouard Leve
#41. During these times of indecision when all the old answers are proven false, the people look back to the dead to give them a clue, they call first upon one and then upon another of those who have acted in the past.
Ralph Ellison
#42. Witches release the chapters of the past, which
invites the novels of the future.
Dacha Avelin
#43. The old equation has changed. Most families no longer save money by keeping wives at home. They lose by not having wives in the workplace, where women have more opportunities than in the past to earn decent wages.
Stephanie Coontz
#44. For now I sit on my final island of the present as my radius of memory shrinks; lost already are the islands of work, of old friendships ... Other islands fade as I brood upon them.
Chuma Nwokolo
#45. From 18 to 29 I was a heavy smoker, heavy drinker, drug addict, terrible eater and philanderer. The past eight years, since I got sober, have honestly been about trying to peel back each of those habits, to get back to the 12-year-old kid inside who was tremendously excited about life.
Dax Shepard
#46. Know what the old masters did. Know how they composed their pictures, but do not fall into the conventions they established. These conventions were right for them, and they are wonderful. They made their language. You make yours. All the past can help you.
Robert Henri
#47. I've always thought that old clothes are a lot like old houses; they bring the past and present together.
Karen White
#48. The past is nothing to [the young], not even another country as it is to the old, or even a nightmare as it is to the guilty.
Cassandra Clare
#49. As long as 'Pearl Harbor' stays in the past, it's perfect; when it wretchedly changes gears in the late going, it becomes the wrong kind of same old story: Hollywood stupidity and callowness, writ large across the sky.
Stephen Hunter
#50. Do old people always live in the past? What yesterday was firm and true, may not be so today.
Franz Grillparzer
#51. You know that old phrase 'Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it'? Well, I think those who remember the past are even worse off.
Chuck Palahniuk
#52. Old things climb out through my mouth and set themselves free in the air. On the high moor there are patterns and in my small mind there are patterns. [...] All the centuries drop away, and I am in the presence of something that does not know time.
Paul Kingsnorth
#53. It hadn't shocked the old woman, not much. She had got past being shocked early in life.
Sherwood Anderson
#54. Republicans working in leadership and the trenches are largely old, white, male, out-of-touch, out of ideas, technology averse, and living in the past.
Mark McKinnon
#55. Past the back of a bunch of stores and an old bar that looked like no one who went in there went in happy.
Gary D. Schmidt
#56. Open-mindedness is considered to be a virtue. But, strictly speaking, it cannot occur. A new experience must be redacted into old categories. We cannot handle each event freshly in its own right. If we did so, of what use would past experience be?
Gordon W. Allport
#57. I putter. I nurse old grudges. I fold origami while nursing old grudges. I think about the past. I wonder if there's any grudges I should start.
Roz Chast
#58. Only the writers can change or fix the past by going back to edit old works
Munia Khan
#59. Once, I went speeding past an old couple and smiled as I imagined their conversation: him grumbling about me and her telling him not to be such an old grouch. Then, suddenly I was in tears, thinking, 'I'll never get to be a grumpy old grandpa!'
Neil Peart
#60. If you wish to find the past preserved, follow the million feet of the crowd. At the worst the uneducated only wear down old things by sheer walking. But the educated kick them down out of sheer culture.
G.K. Chesterton
#61. I could faintly smell the ocean. I imagined being one of the old oak trees standing there swaying in the wind and braving all sorts of weather. I pondered what they had seen in the past and what they might see in the future
Nancy B. Brewer
#62. I know you two are old and up past your bedtime so ill keep this quick.
Sarah J. Maas
#63. A mind cluttered with past thoughts, old conversations and unhealed wounds can only serve to drag us down and compromise our ability to live free.
Shannon Tanner
#64. Thus ended the first and adventurous part of his existence.
What followed was so different that, but for the reality of sorrow which remained with him, this strange part must have resembled a dream.
Joseph Conrad
#65. Perhaps you need to look back before you can move ahead.
Alan Brennert
#66. I would guess that there are limits to what we can understand. But old people always think there are limits to what we can understand. It's the young people who push past those limits.
Leonard Susskind
#67. The very weather seems to have a quality of the past, faded weather like that of old photographs.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#68. In Britain, the theatre has traditionally been where the public goes to think about its past and debate its future. The formation of the National Theatre, at the Old Vic, near the South Bank, in 1963, institutionalized the symbolic importance of drama by giving it both a building and state funding.
John Lahr
#69. Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#70. Was the dementia of old age a blessing in disguise? No more thoughts. No more damage inflicted. No more memories of damage survived.
Janet Turpin Myers
#71. Etymology: from Latin ad-, "to" + visum, past participle of videre, "to see". Advice is what you get from your parents when you are growing up, and from your children when you are growing old.
Evan Esar
#72. The third figure, a tall, old man with a pointed, white goatee, stepped past Mr. Saffron and walked casually down the corridor, scanning the doors.
G. Norman Lippert
#74. People who walk across dark bridges, past saints,
with dim, small lights.
Clouds which move across gray skies
past churches
with towers darkened in the dusk.
One who leans against granite railing
gazing into the evening waters,
His hands resting on old stones.
Franz Kafka
#75. Still, looking through the old volumes was soothing, because thinking of the past made the present seem a little less real.
Dodie Smith
#76. Leave off sniffing the carcass of your old life-do you enjoy unending pain? There is no shame in walking away from bones. Nor is there any special wisdom in injuring oneself over and over. What is your loyalty to that pain? To abandon it will not lessen you.
Robin Hobb
#77. The past is useless
to me now:
an old suitcase
with mould in the lining,
heavy even when empty.
Robyn Sarah
#78. I saw that they wanted to kill the past. When we are old, we let it die; when we are young and strong, we kill it.
Henri Barbusse
#79. The way those old memories kept bubbling to the surface in the present tense was disturbing. It was as if the past had never died; as if on some level of time's great tower, everything was still happening.
Stephen King
#80. Every past used to be a future once upon a time
Munia Khan
#81. It's easier to forget the past if nothing ever reminds you of those leathery old scars that can never again feel any loss or pain; the old wounds must be kept open if you are going to remember their cause and regret their occurrence.
Peter Robinson
#82. Faith, courage, optimism, looking forward, bring us new life and more life. Futility, frustration, living in the past are not only characteristic of 'old age'; they contribute to it.
Maxwell Maltz
#83. Old cookbooks connect you to your past and explain the history of the world.
Jose Andres
#84. As an old, old man, Trout would be asked by Dr. Thor Lembrig, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, if he feared the future. He would give this reply: 'Mr. Secretary-General, it is the past which scares the bejesus out of me.
Kurt Vonnegut
#85. Repeatedly Yates went berserk - raging over grievances old and new, hurling furniture at phantoms out of his past. The nurses who lived upstairs complained about the racket to the landlady, an eccentric woman who adored Yates and did nothing.
Blake Bailey
#86. Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.
Siri Hustvedt
#87. You think everyone will stay behind and do everything you did all over again, forever. You picture old geezers in jean jackets doing whip-its behind the plaza.
Sam Lipsyte
#88. People change as they get older ... grow wiser, make better decisions ... i am very old,Laurel. Anyone who lives as long as I have can't help but collect regrets along the way ... things they did in the past ... things they wish they'd done differently.
Kate Morton
#89. Out past the weekly glimpsed windows, out past the street, lived the world, which had, Old Mrs. Karafilis knew, been dying for years.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#90. All that old road of the past unreeling dizzily as if the cup of life had been overturned and everything gone mad. My eyes ached in nightmare day (235).
Jack Kerouac
#91. Was coming to that troubled twilight time, a time of regrets that resemble hopes, of hopes that resemble regrets, when youth is past but old age has not yet come.
Ivan Turgenev
#92. Revolutions as often take place because the old regime simply collapse out of economic inefficiency and bureaucratic rigidity rather than for the reasons given out by their successors taking too much credit, however heroic their actions at the time of crisis (but so often in the past hopeless).
Bernard Crick
#93. Did you ever think that in a past life Alec was an old woman with ninety cats who was always yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off her lawn? Because I do,
Cassandra Clare
#94. Once upon a time, I thought faeries lived only in books, old folktales, and the past. That was before they burst upon my life as vibrant, luminous beings, permeating my art and my everyday existence, causing glorious havoc.
Brian Froud
#95. Preserve the spirit of a 'lost' age, when time moved slower.
Fennel Hudson
#96. Did he really want this warm room of his, so comfortably fitted with old family furniture, to be transformed into a cave, in which, no doubt, he would be free to crawl about unimpeded in all directions, but only at the price of rapidly and completely forgetting his human past at the same time?
Franz Kafka
#97. I suppose I should have died right then from pure misery and self-pity, but if those things were fatal, no one would ever make it past thirteen years old.
Jeff Lindsay
#98. The old fire pit was ancient. I couldn't say how many of my ancestors warmed themselves at this outdoor hearth. Sitting around it was rather affecting, especially when you thought about the countless people who had occupied your very spot in some distant past. It was kind of surreal.
J.M. Northup
#99. Today, the growers are like a punch-drunk old boxer who doesn't know he's past his prime. The times are changing. The political and social environment has changed. The chickens are coming home to roost - and the time to account for past sins is approaching.
Cesar Chavez
#100. As and old (and clandestine) Soviet joke used to express it, the problem with the past...is that it is always so unpredictable.
Francis X. Blouin
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