Quotes About One's Past

#1. Therapy could be of tremendous benefit to "getting over" one's past if the therapy is focused on specific ways to stop submitting to the temptation to obsess. Many people with difficult histories carry these histories with them, burnishing the past with each retelling.

Augusten Burroughs

#2. Every soul has a past
Every soul lives a present
And every soul deserve a future
no judging on one's past
because its might be your future

Hlovate

#3. It takes great courage to break with one's past history and stand alone.

Marion Woodman

#4. One cannot let the events of one's past murder one's future.

Neal Shusterman

#5. One is always at home in one's past...

Vladimir Nabokov

#6. Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees, ... one's happiness, one's reality?

Virginia Woolf

#7. To be able to look back upon one's past life with satisfaction is to live twice.

Lord Acton

#8. One must break with one's past to embrace one's future. It is never an easy thing to do. It is one of the distinguishing characteristics between survivors and victims. Letting go of what was, to survive what is. (Page 106)

Karen Marie Moning

#9. I think a proud Southerner is a Southerner who is aware of his or her past, and being proud of one's past does not mean you accept it. It means that you realize that we've come through the fire, and we're headed in another direction.

William R. Ferris

#10. It is foolish to regret anything form one's past.

Mary Balogh

#11. One's past is not one's destiny, and it is self-serving to pretend that it is. If henceforth I were miserable, it would be my own fault: and I vowed never to waste my substance on petty domestic conflict.

Theodore Dalrymple

#12. To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

James Baldwin

#13. Memories of one's past are tainted. There are no truths to be found in them.

Morgan Rhodes

#14. One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.

Oscar Wilde

#15. Every serious-minded person knows that a large part of the effort required in moral discipline consists in the courage needed to acknowledge the unpleasant consequences of one's past and present acts.

John Dewey

#16. Sometimes, Ms. Lane," he said, "one must break with one's past to embrace one's future. It is never an easy thing to do. It is one of the distinguishing characteristics between survivors and victims. Letting go of what was, to survive what is.

Karen Marie Moning

#17. 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

#18. But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#19. Only when all conceptions of space and time, life and death, are exploded, when the grip of the past and fear of the future become merely conditions of one's past, only then can one live in the present fully.

Alberto Villoldo

#20. Not to sound too Dr. Phil all of a sudden, but I think the key to survival is to embrace one's past and to not run away from it. And to come to some sort of relationship with it or understanding of it.

Anderson Cooper

#21. One faces the future with one's past.

Pearl S. Buck

#22. To desire to change one's past means there is a desire to change oneself.
To desire to change oneself, one must learn to change.

Lorii Myers

#23. In many cases where one is content to lead a secluded life it is not necessary to say much of one's past, but as a rule something must be said. People have the habit of inquiring - if they are no more than butchers and bakers. By degrees one must account for this and that fact, and it was so here.

Theodore Dreiser

#24. It's quite a scary path to walk on,
When you have no one's past experience to lean on, or learn from.
It's all new and uncharted.
But nothing is finished unless it is started.

Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

#25. Motherhood rarely allows for solitude, yet it begets its own kind of isolation: from one's past, from one's youth, from the women we once thought we were and would become.

Hannah Nordhaus

#26. Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw.

Jules Feiffer

#27. The sense of one's past is so strong and forms our sense of self so strongly, it will always fascinate, elude and confuse me.

Samantha Harvey

#28. There are times when one's life appears to be a stage. People come, people go. They come in order to go, and go with no intent of return. When they return, they return as one's past. A past that would make you feel that the present is false.

Vijay Tendulkar

#29. It's funny how one thing can make you realize something like that. One can be ready to give up the children one always wanted, one can be ready to withstand remarks about one's past, or one's clothes, but then - a tiny remark and the soul deflates and says: Oh. I

Elizabeth Strout

#30. It's very hard to review one's past without cheating a little.

Simon De Beauvoir

#31. To be able to enjoy one's past life is to live twice.

Martial

#32. One's past can't be erased, it can only be learned from, the child taught her.

H. L. Balcomb

#33. All the events of your past have formed a lens, or paradigm, through which you see the world. And since no one's past is exactly like anyone else's, no two people see alike.

Sean Covey

#34. A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything's going to be all right. you've made it past Dead Man's Curve and you're out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not.

Haruki Murakami

#35. And each forgets, as he strips and runs With a brilliant, fitful pace, It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones Who win in the lifelong race. And each forgets that his youth has fled, Forgets that his prime is past, Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead, In the glare of the truth at last.

Robert W. Service

#36. One left; things shifted in one's absence; one returned to something else. Time frustrated all. There was no sneaking past its rough guard, even to get to one's own yard of intimacies.

Gish Jen

#37. That's when I realized that part of me would probably always be lost in the past. That just seemed to be my personality: I was the one who couldn't stand change.

Beth Harbison

#38. I hope to be around past the 90's. I don't want to just be categorized as one of this era. My goal is to have a career that stands.

Mariah Carey

#39. How does one know that, before the first hello? It's a heaviness in the air combined with a lightness of step. It's a slowing down of the past, and a speeding up of the future.

Melanie Benjamin

#40. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading
that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur's life a good one, or Thomas Mann's?

Annie Dillard

#41. People mess up, you know? But you can't see past it. It's like you choose one thing about them - the worst thing - and say, 'That's who they are,' and ignore the rest of it. Why not choose the best thing about them instead? Or the thing they do the most?

Sarah Skilton

#42. There's a convention that one doesn't speak ill of the dead. That's stupid, I think. The truth's always the truth. On the whole it's better to keep your mouth shut about living people. You might conceivably injure them. The dead are past that. But the harm they've done lives after them sometimes.

Agatha Christie

#43. There was no way to grasp the reality of the present which slid away each second, invisible as air; reality only existed after the fact, in one's vision of the past.

Paula Fox

#44. On Furnishing One's Home
Pick your furniture like you pick a wife; it should make you feel comfortable and look nice, but not so nice that if someone walks past it they want to steal it.

Justin Halpern

#45. I'd always leaned toward the shy side but was never unsocial until I started seeing visions of people from the past. It's a really strange existence, not knowing if the person you're talking to is physically there or not. Not knowing if you're one hallucination away from a psychotic break.

Myra McEntire

#46. There is only one real tragedy in a woman's life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.

Oscar Wilde

#47. I can't just open myself up the way some people can. And down here, you're raised a certain way. You're taught to keep some things private, family matters especially. It's just the way it's done."

"Everyone worships the past but no one really wants to talk about it.

Cathy Holton

#48. Maybe your past isn't perfect. Maybe it was brutal. Maybe you were brutal. Maybe you've got more scars than you thought one skin could hold. You can't linger on those thoughts. You will drown in them. After all, it's only an interesting backstory if you can get past it.

Jessica Hagy

#49. Doing everything with one arm, being well-known, and having a book and a movie, it's fairly abnormal. As far as just not having to worry about past experiences, I've healed very well.

Bethany Hamilton

#50. One must be willing to stand alone - in the unknown, with no reference to authority or the past or any of one's conditioning. One must stand where no one has stood before in complete nakedness, innocence, and humility.

Adyashanti

#51. It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived.

Susan Sontag

#52. Do you have a favorite team?"
He smirked. Literally smirked.
"There's only one New York team."
Alexa fought past the nausea and asked the question.
"Which one?"
"The Yankees, of course. It's the only team that wins. It's the only team that matters.

Jennifer Probst

#53. It's only been in the past two generations that we truly understood the impact our civilization has had on the natural world. To our credit as a species, we have turned this obscure scientific fact about carbon cycles into one of the most important political issues of the 21st century.

Annalee Newitz

#54. The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was.Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.

Bernard Malamud

#55. Two children of same cruel parent look at one another and see in each other the image of the cruel parent or the image of their past oppressor. This is very much the case between Jew and Arab: It's a conflict between two victims.

Amos Oz

#56. One's own yesterday is a ghost that will not be laid down.

Glen Cook

#57. There was silence on the other end. The static crackle from one hundred kilometres of telephone lines. Crows sitting on them, shivering, while people's conversations darted past under their feet.

John Ajvide Lindqvist

#58. This was my attempt to deter cold callers: "There's no past, there's no future, just one pulsating present ... Please leave your message after the tone."

Bill Bailey

#59. Not only is the statistical madness an assault on individuality, it's also one on temporality too. Statistics - even when accurate - are only an image of the past that can then be Photoshopped before being pasted on to the future.

Will Self

#60. To go out in a gondola at night is to reconstruct in one's imagination the true Venice, the Venice of the past alive with romance, elopements, abductions, revenged passions, intrigues, adulteries, denouncements, unaccountable deaths, gambling, lute playing and singing.

Peggy Guggenheim

#61. Until one looks back on one's own past one fails to realise what an extraordinary view of the world a child has.

Agatha Christie

#62. Beyond the edge of the world there's a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.

Haruki Murakami

#63. The oldest thing of all is the present, because there's never been anything else but present. No one has ever lived in the past, and no one lives in the future, either.

Harry Mulisch

#64. It is only after a fair portion of one's life that one really knows what are the things that matter, the things that will remain until the end.

Esther Meynell

#65. The Marines already have started putting women through infantry training. They've done it for the past couple of years. And it's tough. Roughly one-third of women have made it through that infantry training. So you're not going to see a lot of women actually make it through this.

Renee Montagne

#66. we are in one of those great historical periods that occur every 200 or 300 years when people don't understand the world anymore, and the past is not sufficient to explain the future

Kim S. Cameron

#67. Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom.

David Mamet

#68. If it's one thing I could change about my past it would be to stop worrying about my past.

Lisa M. Cronkhite

#69. 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

#70. War makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right.

C.S. Lewis

#71. There's no such thing as a young refugee; every migrant has a past they've fled from, and how can you be young when you already have one life behind you?

Lev Golinkin

#72. It's one of the greatest honors I could ever imagine - to be able to represent my country and to be able to wear "USA" on my back. It's an incredible honor. It's an accomplishment of the past four year but of a life of dreaming and working hard and doing everything I can in pursuit of this goal.

Elana Meyers

#73. I'm anxious about work, the future, friendships, past relationships ... I'm just one of those people that, whatever I'm doing, it's a big worry.

Conor McPherson

#74. God forbid, one day you two might understand what it's like to lose everything. To have to face it again, afterward - that might be the worst part. Sometimes the past should stay in the past.

City of Savages

Lee Kelly

#75. Only one life, it will soon be past,
only what's done for Christ will last.

Elizabeth George

#76. There's nothing to say. The past is in the past for a reason. You either choose to learn from it or repeat it. I was never one to read a book twice and I won't do the same with my life."

Siva

Micalea Smeltzer

#77. There's nothing in the future and there's nothing in the past. There is only this one moment, and you've got to make it last.

Robyn Hitchcock

#78. You were never really free of it, your past. No one is. It just went dormant, that's all.

Joe Hart

#79. There is the past, and there is the future. The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other. We live poised on that second as it's hurtling forward - toward what?

Laini Taylor

#80. We may only ever have one great, passionate love, but sometimes it's best to leave that kind of love in the past. A love like that can't last forever.

Cassia Leo

#81. It's like you wake up one morning, and decided that how you've been in the past doesn't have to define who you are in the future. Simple as that.

Carolyn Mackler

#82. The thoughtful believer recalls God's faithfulness in the past when confronted by any new threat. Part of spiritual maturity is strong sense of one's own history.

Max Anders

#83. When you go through a significant injury and have a major career change, you truly do go one year at a time, and you don't look past what's going on now, because you are not sure what's going to happen. Tomorrow is not promised.

Peyton Manning

#84. We're all products of our past," Devon said. "What we choose to do with it is our decision, no one else's. You can choose to be damaged, fragile. Or you can choose to be more than the broken elements of your psyche. Fire tempers steel. Pain tempers character.

Tiffany Snow

#85. We all have pasts and we all have futures. All we can do is choose to live in one or the other. It doesn't seem to me that there's much point living in the past.

Jayne Ann Krentz

#86. The one who forgives never brings up the past to that person's face. When you forgive, it's like it never happened. True forgiveness is complete and total.

Louis Zamperini

#87. Learning to live in the present tense-one that's free from the failures of the past and the anxieties of the future-is a wonderful gift, and one you always should be striving for.

Rick Pitino

#88. For many of us, the happiest future is one that's precisely like the past, except a little better

Seth Godin

#89. Luckily, my wife is amazing. She's one of the few people in my life I'm completely honest with. I've told her everything about my past. She knows me inside and out. There's no secrets at all.

Brendon Urie

#90. One of the worst things we could do is start to act now as though the attack of 9/11 is a thing of the past and will never be repeated. That's just not true.

Dick Cheney

#91. One can't deny what has happened to us in the past. The secret is to enjoy and be proud of the music we've created and the people with whom we have been linked. It's all a long chain of involvement in the world, and we are proud to be yet another link in this chain.

Graham Nash

#92. The fact about contemporaries is that they're doing the same thing on another railway line: one resents their distracting one, flashing past, the wrong way- something like that: from timidity, partly, one keeps one's eyes on one's own road.

Virginia Woolf

#93. I learned one thing from De Niro: He taught me to listen. Nobody says anything strictly from the script. It's improvised. It was the best piece of advice I have ever gotten in my life. It has helped me through the past thirty years.

Cathy Moriarty

#94. Near-death experiences release a lot of endorphins, resulting in a natural high," Tod whispered. "And it's totally true that one passion feeds another."
"You know we're way past 'near-death', right?"
"My endorphins aren't listening to you.

Rachel Vincent

#95. They lined you up in kindergarten, alphabetically. On fourth-grade field trips you took your partner's hand to push past the musk ox or the steam turbine. School was a perpetual lineup, ending in this final one.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#96. Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone's finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?

Walker Percy

#97. Most people past college age are not atheists. It's too hard to be in society, for one thing. Because you don't get any days off. And if you're an agnostic you don't know whether you get them off or not.

Mort Sahl

#98. Time and experience have a funny way of altering one's recollections of the past.

Wendy Webb

#99. Tapping into our inherent sexuality can offer a gateway to deep healing of past hurts and wounds, which are carried in the body and can hinder one's potentials for leading the happy, sexually fulfilled life we all deserve.

Antonia Hall

#100. I cannot stand the words Get over it. All of us are under such pressure to put our problems in the past tense. Slow down. Don't allow others to hurry your healing. It is a process, one that may take years, occasionally, even a lifetime - and that's OK.

Beau Taplin