Past Story Quotes

#1. Be alert and present and see that your identity is not from your past story; who you truly are is the alert presence that is inseparable from the present moment. You are this, which has no name and no form.

Eckhart Tolle

#2. When you change your NOW story, you instantly change your past story and your future story.

Robert G. Allen

#3. It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.

Tobias Wolff

#4. It's easier to construct a more palatable life story-where I can draw straight lines from each hurt of the past to the healing I later experienced-than to face the raw truth.

Lysa TerKeurst

#5. Your future is ahead of you. Imagine the notion of the past fifteen years of your life being a blip in your story.

Jay-Z

#6. History is about the untold story, and writing historical fiction is a wonderful way to present the past in a compelling and entertaining way.

Paul W. Feenstra

#7. He made me feel unhinged ... like he could take me apart and put me back together again and again.

Chelsie Shakespeare

#8. On some level, every story draws something from life experiences. Most of the time, it's just a matter of me pulling bits and pieces of my own past to help give characters or settings a little more life.

Cullen Bunn

#9. My first two novels were set in the past, and that freed me up in a lot of ways; it allowed me to find my way into my story and my characters through research.

Jennifer Gilmore

#10. You're after something - not a story, but a certain, exquisitely intense encounter with beauty - and the only way to find it is to tiptoe past the dragon's cave.

William Finnegan

#11. You may have told me your story, but you're still practically a stranger to me. I don't know the you that you are right now as well as I know your past.

K. Weikel

#12. True revolutionary change begins by first challenging yourself -- not the world. Until you own your story and the complexities of your experience, no matter how much you may strain against it, you will still be enslaved -- if not by your oppressor, by your past.

Sil Lai Abrams

#13. I have a very healthy dose of self-loathing. But I think we all have a past of being whatever our story was, of feeling not good enough. It can propel you to work harder and do more, but it can also be a tremendous trap, and you can't see beyond it.

Kim Cattrall

#14. Our sense of community and compassionate intelligence must be extended to all life forms, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human beings. This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.

Terry Tempest Williams

#15. Vomiting isn't bad either, take note. It is, in certain more obvious respects, a show of force. I have always liked this story 'A man holding with one hand to a one-way sign is vomiting into the gutter, another man goes past near him and tells him: "If you only knew how much I agree with you.

Jean Fremon

#16. There are times in our lives when we have to realize our past is precisely what it is, and we cannot change it. But we can change the story we tell ourselves about it, and by doing that, we can change the future.

Eleanor Brown

#17. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

Tim O'Brien

#18. Everything we come across becomes a part of us. It doesn't matter how small or insignificant it is ... or how devastating. One story here, one story there, that's what I see when I look back at my life. An accumulation of everything I went through.

Bhaskaryya Deka

#19. A story can be new and yet tell about olden times. The past comes into existence with the story.

Michael Ende

#20. The Adam story, then, is not simply about the past. It's about Israel's present brought into the past - even as far past as the beginning of the human drama itself.

Peter Enns

#21. Every man wants love, if he can get past the fear of exposure.

Barbara Delinsky

#22. Whether you attribute it to some mysterious triple package or to your own Horatio Alger story, to succeed in America is, somehow, to be complicit with the idea of America - which means that at some level you've made peace with its rather ugly past.

Vijay Iyer

#23. Hello my Country I once came to tell everyone your story Your passion was my poetry And your past my most potent glory Your promise was my prayer Your hypocrisy my nightmare And your problems fill my present Are we both going somewhere?

Harry Chapin

#24. 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

#25. I miss you because memory
is a kind editor.
The past is a long scroll and
in it is the story of us,
told with gentle metaphor, and
words that bring
you back and back, even as you
lie there, lying.

Corey Mesler

#26. Step beyond right and wrong, and resist passing judgment. Who you've been and what you've experienced in the past isn't good ... and it isn't bad. You might not know the whole story.

Denise Linn

#27. We have no need for the past. All we need are the present and the future. - Ciel Phantomhive

Yana Toboso

#28. Either the present part of the story slowed down a bit and waited for the past part to catch up, or the past part speeded up and overtook the present part. (We

A.C. Weisbecker

#29. And, as Rhonda told the story, she thought: this is how the past gets passed down. This is how memories are made. Half-invented, embellished, given a touch of whimsy.

Jennifer McMahon

#30. A man always revealed his own inner story in his actions and expressions. A man's past deeds foretold his future and allowed anyone with half a brain to divine the path he would take.

Alice Hoffman

#31. Love is a two-way game, you cannot truly love one who does not love you, and neither can you force them to love you, better look past the hurtful deeds and search for the one who truly loves you and that will be right with you.

Auliq Ice

#32. Lust was a story I knew. There were many women I took to bed for the night. I yearned for them in the moment, but in the morning, any lover Id had was already claimed by the past, even if she was still calling my name.

Alice Hoffman

#33. History narrates stories about great men from the past,write your story now and make history

Mohammed Sekouty

#34. Leave No Trace (bad language)
Sometimes she will speak of him as present, sometimes as past, and sometimes as always. That is how it should be. No one needs rescuing from her own story of the truth and no one needs to side step her history. p270

Hannah Nyala

#35. We all tell little lies about ourselves, Our past, our presents. We think some of them are minuscule, unimportant, And others, large and incriminating. But they are the same. Only God Has enough of the story to judge our souls.

Sarah McCoy

#36. The way you remember the past depends upon your hope for the future. And if what you see in your future has no hope, it has no potential, then you view the past that brought you to here as not very good.

Story Musgrave

#37. Forgive me...Elliot. Perhaps I could have saved you...but I don't want to deny the story in which you existed. ...I...will not allow the past to be altered...!
-Leo

Jun Mochizuki

#38. I work with gold that holds our past and diamonds that see the future and rubies that long for love. It's just a way of telling a story.

Waris Ahluwalia

#39. History is not what happened in the past, but the best story we can tell with the available material

Joshua Wolf Shenk

#40. When you understand, that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.

Chuck Palahniuk

#41. I feel like a traitor, a phony, a fake. But I am a hypocrite with the best intentions, and I need kissing desperately.

Coco J. Ginger

#42. Everyone had a story behind them, a past richer than she had imagined.

Tyrean Martinson

#43. It is the job of the human brain to assemble all the input of our world - sights, sounds, smells - into a coherent narrative. This is what memory is, a carefully calibrated story that we make up about our past.

Noah Hawley

#44. Your past is your story. Your story is your most powerful asset. Embrace it.

Sarah Centrella

#45. In the past, if you did film, you couldn't do stage, and if you did film, you certainly didn't do television. You had to pick what you wanted to be. Now it seems like we can bounce around, not only between genres, but between mediums, and I like that. I like change and I like a good story.

Garret Dillahunt

#46. We don't have to relive the sad and bad memories of Christmas Past. We can create new Christmas memories in the present for the future.

Tom North

#47. Sometimes God redeems your story by surrounding you with people who need to hear your past so it doesn't become their future.

Jon Acuff

#48. The novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed to me shortsighted ... To write a book set in the present, circa 2013, is to write about the distant past.

Gary Shteyngart

#49. As the story grew, it put down roots into the past and threw out unexpected branches .

J.R.R. Tolkien

#50. The problem with middle age, at least when it comes to modeling, is you seldom see a model who is past 27, 28. If they use anyone older, then it becomes automatically a 'personality' story.

Isabella Rossellini

#51. Here, then, is the story of algebra. It all began in the remote past, with a simple turn of thought from the declarative to the interrogative, from "this plus this equals this" to "this plus what equals this?

Anonymous

#52. I have to trick myself into writing a story - impose some arbitrary constraint to distract me from the constraints of my past habits or my fear that I don't have much to say.

Catherine Brady

#53. It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.

Umberto Eco

#54. There were so many wrongs piling up on both sides, so much of the past being dragged into the present, that living there was like carving the story of your life on to a sepulchral monument.

Sara Sheridan

#55. So I'm delighted to open up a bit about these particular details, in honor of Valentine's Day (when every balding, chubby, and short actuary wants people - especially the babes out there - to know about his studly past"
From: "My Best Valentine's Day.Ever: a Short Story

Zack Love

#56. The world is full of victims; don't add to the growing culture of "I've a story to tell", well not unless it's a story to help others overcome situations or as a warning.

Stephen Richards

#57. The story of your past doesn't have to become the story of your life.

Luminita D. Saviuc

#58. He has never told anyone this story. He doesn't mind talking to Richard, to Rafe about his past
within reason
but he doesn't mean to give away pieces of himself.

Hilary Mantel

#59. I don't care too much for thinking about the past. The truth is just another story. You can remember it any way you want; it's never gonna be the same twice.

Frank Fairfield

#60. The moral of the story is even though that seemed like the end of the world back then, right now I can look back on it and laugh. And if anyone is going through something similar right now just know it will get better.

Phil Lester

#61. He gets away with it because he's strong.'
'This is the story of mankind.'
'I thought you were going to be a priest at one point.'
'Yes. But then I read the newspaper.

Christopher Buehlman

#62. There is an appropriate way to use your story, not as an excuse but as a testimony to God's ability to free you from the past.

Andy Stanley

#63. Stories are all around us, caught in the throats of the strangers you walk past and scrawled on the pages of locked diaries. They're in love letters that were never sent and between the lines of every conversation ever spoken. Just because your story's not written down doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Jodi Picoult

#64. Some people read palms to tell your future, but I read hands to tell your past. Each scar makes a story worth telling. Each callused palm, each cracked knuckle is a missed punch or years in a factory.

Sarah Kay

#65. Old things tell a story, Mr. Gilchrist, just as the lives of people do,' Miss Iverness's dark eyes were fixed intently on him. 'They preserve the past and remind us of how far we have come.

Sarah E. Ladd

#66. To those of you who are enslaved by your past, may my story set you free. For youth is innocent and its beauty is to always be cherished.

Nancy B. Brewer

#67. Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility ... Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.

Terry Tempest Williams

#68. What is clear is that at some point my father determined he would write the story of his life himself, rather than let it be written for him by his tortured past. And this resolve was the greatest gift he bequeathed to his children.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#69. Without a past you can't have a future.

Michael Ende

#70. If the past is no longer present
is it fiction?

Natasha Tsakos

#71. Kerry Cohen's powerful, transfixing story will be familiar to many women, most of whom won't want to admit it. In this heartfelt and authentic memoir, Cohen transcends the pain and shame of a promiscuous past, and leaves readers with a sense of hope and triumph.

Janice Erlbaum

#72. Reality is always the story of a past, and what I love about the past is - it's over.

Byron Katie

#73. The forms of the short, written poem as they have been developed in English over the past few centuries can be usefully seen as compressed, truncated, or fragmented imitations of other verbal forms, especially the play, story, public oration, and personal essay.

Robert Scholes

#74. The real difference between telling what happened and telling a story about what happened is that instead of being a victim of our past, we become master of it.

Donald Davis

#75. The past doesn't exist except as a memory, a mental story, and though past events aren't changeable, your stories about them are. You can act now to transform the way you tell the story of your past, ultimately making it a stalwart protector of your future.

Martha Beck

#76. The past is perpetually in play, always malleable, ever salvageable. Did any of this story happen as I said it did? The telling of a tale puts a prism to it from which incalculable new angles rainbow forth. You made this as real as I; remember it however you'd like.

Daniel Kraus

#77. Blue stands for many things at the end of time: for the forgotten, blazing blue stars of aeons past; the antithesis of redshift, the color of uncut veins beneath your skin.
This story is written in blue ink, although you do not know that yet.

Yoon Ha Lee

#78. History is not just about the analysis of evidence, unrolling vellum documents or answering exam papers. It is not about judging the dead. It is about understanding the meaning of the past - to realize the whole evolving human story over centuries, not just our own lifetimes.

Ian Mortimer

#79. Our unfathomable evolutionary past paints a picture vastly more immense than any spiritual story could ever create because it is raw and real, violent, dirty and beautiful - and because of that - it's spectacular!

Christopher Zzenn Loren

#80. In Los Angeles you get the sense sometimes that there's a mysterious patrol at night: when the streets are empty and everyone's asleep, they go erasing the past. It's like a bad Ray Bradbury story - 'The Memory Erasers'.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#81. It is not because I do not love my adopted land - it is the natural feeling of one far from home, who remembers those happy, carefree days when life flowed at full tide, without responsibility, flashing past one like the drama in a fascinating story of adventure and romance.

Erich Von Stroheim

#82. This is my story. These things are my past, and I will not allow them to be washed away. I will find a way to have them back.

Lauren DeStefano

#83. I would say as a journalist, I would envision travelling to other countries that have had to reckon with their past and see how they've done it: what worked, what didn't work, finding characters that would tell the story of how that process was done.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#84. One's story isn't a skin to be shed - it's inescapable, one's body and blood. You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story that's at once your invention and the invention of you.

Philip Roth

#85. A sane person would think that Wal-Mart would never carry 'Capitalism: A Love Story' because it's simply not in their best interests to inform their customers of their shady past.

Michael Moore

#86. I think the idea of a traditional story being told using traditional animation is likely a thing of the past,

Jeffrey Katzenberg

#87. Love covers all shortcomings and failures, overlooks one's mistakes and does not bring to mind one's past mistakes - My Last Letter, Chapter 1

Santosh Avvannavar

#88. This is why, if you want to get to know someone, you need to know their story. Their life is a story. It, too, has a past and a future. It, too, unfolds in a series of scenes over the course of time.

John Eldredge

#89. When you are in the present moment, you break the continuity of your story, of past and future. Then true intelligence arises, and also love.

Eckhart Tolle

#90. The past, like Lindsey had told him, is a logical story. IT's the sense of what happened, But since it is not yet remembered, the future need not make any fugging sense at all.

John Green

#91. The deciphering of ancient scripts changed forever the way Europeans were able to imagine the story of humanity, destroying centuries of received authority about the past with repercussions as important for our understanding of time and history as the geological studies of the same period.

Neil MacGregor

#92. I'm not the color of my skin. I'm a story. One with a past and a future unwritten.

Heidi W. Durrow

#93. Because God gave you your makeup and superintended every moment of your past, including all the hardship, pain, and struggles, He wants to use your words in a unique manner. No one else can speak through your vocal cords, and, equally important, no one else has your story.

Charles R. Swindoll

#94. Nevertheless, the book gave Jack a feeling he had never had before, that the past was like a story, in which one thing led to another, and the world was not a boundless mystery, but a finite thing that could be comprehended.

Ken Follett

#95. My grandfather used to say the placement of a birthmark was the story of how a person lost the battle in their past life. I guess you got stabbed in the neck. Bet it was a quick death, though.

Colleen Hoover

#96. History isn't all fact
it's just the story the victors tell to keep themselves in power. And it's been a slow revision. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to reinvent the past.

Heather Anastasiu

#97. Where I'm at is a big Episcopal church in downtown Newark, New Jersey, sitting in the dark while I try to rescue the doomed bits and pieces of life, in the hope that a mere story can become Noah's Ark and deliver all the living things of the past to a bright and glorious immortality?

Chuck Palahniuk

#98. Words contain the "souls" or minds of people in the past; as such, they tell the story of consciousness.

Philip Zaleski

#99. People of vision gauge decisions on the future; the story of the past cannot be rewritten.

J. Oswald Sanders

#100. Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

Edmond De Goncourt