Quotes About Things In The Past

#1. 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

#2. Half of bravery is perspective. The first time I did this, it was one of the hardest things I had ever done. Now, preparing to jump off a moving train is nothing, because I have done more difficult things in the past few weeks that most people will in a lifetime.

Veronica Roth

#3. When you face up to bad things in the past, the most important thing is not to allow them to happen today or in the future, and as storytellers, we must play our part in that.

Michelle Yeoh

#4. You want to ignore it and leave things in the past. But you're always going to be scared that I can't love you through anything if you don't give me the chance to prove that I will.

Laurelin Paige

#5. People have said things about me, and wrote and criticized me about things in the past, but it goes in one ear and out the other.

Floyd Mayweather Jr.

#6. You can't figure out what to do in the future by looking at how you did things in the past

Roger Lewin

#7. When there's a history between people, it makes for some serious complications - even in something seemingly as simple as friendship. There is no real starting over. There's only trying to minimize the importance of things in the past. And some events are just too life altering to trivialize.

Megan Thomason

#8. I've done a lot of bad things in the past, and that troubles me. It is often before I could say I was a self.

Malcolm Morley

#9. You know, I guess I just don't like to talk a lot about sad things. Now you know my flaw. What good does it do to talk about sad things in the past?

James Patterson

#10. When i spend too much time in my head, focused on things in the past or things in the future ... when i lose sight of the present, i fold in on myself, mentally, my thoughts become toxic and distorted, my emotions, darken.

Jaeda DeWalt

#11. Not everything in your past qualifies to be called HISTORY; only the things in the past that shaped your FUTURE

Fela Durotoye

#12. And there are certain moments in your life when something becomes clear, and other things in the past - things that your mind, unbeknownst to you, had earmarked because they didn't quite add up - suddenly all click into place, like small gears in a watch.

Bridget Asher

#13. We have either to progress or to degenerate. Our ancestors did great things in the past, but we have to grow into a fuller life and march beyond even their great achievements.

Swami Vivekananda

#14. Anger and shame laced with loneliness spread throughout her, heating her to the core. Self-pity wasn't something Bess would normally succumb to, but things in the past few months had fallen apart, and there was no one there to help pick up the pieces.

Inger Iversen

#15. If many things in the past have gone wrong in the lives of men and in the lives of their communities, it is because both small- and large-scale activities were blundered into without any thought or vision of universal planning.

Fritz Zwicky

#16. Suddenly I felt that determination well up, which had helped me to accomplish things in the past, even when I was only six years old.

Gisela Hausmann

#17. It does so happen to be the case that if the freedom of the people of this country-and especially the rights of trade unionists-if those precious things in the past had been left to the good sense and fairmindedness of judges, we would have precious few freedoms in this country.

Michael Foot

#18. I think long and carefully about what novels ought to do. They should clarify the roles that have become obscured; they ought to identify those things in the past that are useful and those things that are not; and they ought to give nourishment.

Toni Morrison

#19. Even in high school I was very interested in history - why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.

George Lucas

#20. Fame is like a big eraser. It's strange, now that I'm famous. In my parents' opinion, all the shitty things - all the wreckage of my past - is erased. Now it's like I was never the kid who got arrested. Now I'm a wonderful son.

Bobcat Goldthwait

#21. 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

#22. The script's always important, but there are some things that have come out in the past year that, when we read them, everyone was like, "Oh my god, this is going to be the next best thing!" Then the movie falls completely flat on its face.

Douglas Booth

#23. You've got nothing to lose. Many people don't allow themselves to love, precisely because of that, because there are a lot of things at risk, a lot of future and a lot of past. In your case, there is only the present.

Paulo Coelho

#24. I always liked it when people go back in time to discover things about themselves, like with 'A Christmas Carol' and you're getting a tour of your life by the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future.

John Cusack

#25. Then I'd be dead," I pointed out. "Among other things. Fool, there is no sense in trying to play
that game with the past. Here is where we are today, and we can only make our moves from here.

Robin Hobb

#26. In the past, the U.K. got away with selling things that weren't unusual. Now it's no use trying to export without having something that's unusual and better.

James Dyson

#27. The reason I entered politics was a belief that the people of this country - having achieved so much that was good and noble in our past - had the potential to do amazing things in the future.

Michael Gove

#28. It wasn't going to be hard ... it was going to be impossible. It wouldn't deter me. I'd done impossible things several times in the past, and the prospect didn't scare me as much as it used to.

Jasper Fforde

#29. There were things in my past which I have not liked. But all the things of which I was proud will remain.

Ayn Rand

#30. But O, sick children of the world,
Of all the many changing things
In dreary dancing past us whirled,
To the cracked tune that Chronos sings,
Words alone are certain good.

William Butler Yeats

#31. But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.

Aldous Huxley

#32. I really do see the good in people, and I don't want to change that. That's really how I view things, so sometimes I'll look past a lot of huge red flags because I see something else in someone. Then, of course, it always comes back to haunt me in the long run.

Jennifer Morrison

#33. How very near us stand the two vast gulfs of time, the past and the future, in which all things disappear.

Marcus Aurelius

#34. There's nothing easy about winning a game in the National Football League, let alone winning a championship, things that we've done in the past. However, that's in the past.

Rodney Harrison

#35. I recall feeling an almost delicious terror when one day I found myself alone in the midst of tall June grasses that grew high as my head. But here the secret working of self consciousness is almost too entangled with the things of the past for me to explain it.

Pierre Loti

#36. And as far as wishing goes, I save my wishes for things that can still come true. There's no point in wasting them on the past.

G.A. McKevett

#37. By changing the way I experienced things, even just involving different details than in reality, I often felt I was betraying the past and playing an unfair game with the reader where he (of course) would ask himself "Did this really happen?"

Sasa Stanisic

#38. Humanity is moving in a circle. The progress in mechanical things of the past hundred years has proceeded at the cost of losing many other things which perhaps were much more important for it.

G.I. Gurdjieff

#39. One gains a double benefit in writing about the past, conjuring up how things might have been, and at the same time acquiring a different perspective on the present.

Robert Harris

#40. In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.

Don DeLillo

#41. Do you have things in your past you're not proud of? Things that make you feel ashamed?'
'That's what makes Christ's death on the cross so personal.

Katie Ganshert

#42. Many a time in the past, when an active operator on Wall Street, he had done things ... which would have caused raised eyebrows on the fo'c'sle of a pirate sloop - and done them without a blush.

P.G. Wodehouse

#43. I do sometimes look back at things I've written in the past, and think, 'I just don't remember being the person who wrote that.'

Brian Eno

#44. When you define yourself based on things you have done, in order to maintain that self-image you must constantly look away from the present moment, as you search for a means of self-understanding through past experiences.

Chris Matakas

#45. People from the past always seem to have much more time to create beautiful, intricate, delicate things that often reach the future in a kind of curled-up, capsized state.

Robyn Hitchcock

#46. 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

#47. The paradox is that we can become wiser and more compassionate and live more fulfilling lives by refusing to be who we have tended to be in the past. But we must also relax, accepting things as they are in the present, as we strive to change ourselves.

Sam Harris

#48. I won't lie, I've had a lot of discouraging moments in the past years, moments I wasn't sure about things and doubted myself.

Shania Twain

#49. I like to spend time in the past, with the things that have been important to me.

John Wooden

#50. Don't live in regret! It is such a useless idea.
Use the memory to prevent us do bad things!
Regret is a childish wish, or an empty hope,
trying to revise the bitter memory of the past.

Toba Beta

#51. It costs so much to promote something these days that almost always safety is the preferred option, reference back to things which have been successful in the past. Also, people are simply not given the time to develop and find themselves and their audience as we were.

Peter Hammill

#52. It's in the act of having to do things that you don't want to that you learn something about moving past the self. Past the ego.

Bell Hooks

#53. We may remember what the Romansthought a cultivated person ought to be: one who knows how to choose his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as in the past.

Hannah Arendt

#54. First, I look at history the way I look at evolution. Some things die out for a good reason, and should be left dead. I put dictatorships and velociraptors in the same category: leave them in the past, where they can serve as frightening object lessons for the present.

Holly Lisle

#55. Resume: a written exaggeration of only the good things a person has done in the past, as well as a wish list of the qualities a person would like to have.

Bo Bennett

#56. So you keep running after the things you want, because you think they will satisfy you - and you truly do think that in the past they gave you satisfaction. But the satisfaction itself, the real feeling of it, somehow slips the net. It's anticipated and remembered but almost never experienced.

Kate Morgenroth

#57. But it is easy to speak of the past, impossible to go there. I am powerful in ways you can only dream, yet I am still a prisoner of what I have done. I can never escape the cell I have made for myself. Things are what they are.

Joe Abercrombie

#58. When you can see your life in retrospect, the romanticism of how good things once were gives way to the reality that positives and negatives comprise every day and every decade. (235)

Victoria Moran

#59. Of course things might have gone roughly in the past, but the past is over and cannot touch you unless you hold on to it. Right now, in this moment, the universe is responding not to your past but to the truth of who you are, always were, and always will be.

Marianne Williamson

#60. If you have value as an artist it's probably going to be in your capacity to let things inside you get past things that are placed there to keep you from telling the truth. The more you see things as clearly and coldly as you can, the more value you're going to have.

Tony Kushner

#61. In the past two years, I've started the process of becoming a new man. I am much chastened and profoundly remorseful over the reckless and hurtful things I have done in my life, especially those which have brought me before you today.

Jack Abramoff

#62. It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.

Hannah Arendt

#63. There are times God puts things in our lives that remind us of the past, so that we know ... not all is as lost as we thought it was.

Jennifer Megan Varnadore

#64. My distant past, that is. The last time we were together he said he'd leave me to figure things out in my own time, and a lot of that sort of time has passed.

Kristina Wright

#65. The rich of this world will vanish like smoke, and no memory of their past pleasures will remain. But even in their lifetime they do not enjoy them without bitterness, weariness and fear, for the very things whence they derive their pleasures often carry with them the seeds of sorrow.

Thomas A Kempis

#66. Don't let the darkness of your past block the light of joy in your present. What happened is done. Stop giving time to things that no longer exist when there is so much joy to be found in the here and now.

Karen Salmansohn

#67. I bless you, all living things, I bless you in the endless past, I bless you in the endless present, I bless you in the endless future, amen.

Jack Kerouac

#68. Time also was said to be an accident: it "exists not by itself; but simply from the things which happen, the sense apprehends what has been done in time past, as well as what is present, and what is to follow after.

Matthew Moncrieff Pattison Muir

#69. All things fade into the storied past, and in a little while are shrouded in oblivion.

Marcus Aurelius

#70. 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

#71. In the past, my brain babbling at such length had meant there was something it either didn't want to think about
which things numbered in the dozens right now
or it was working out some extreme cleverness that would at any moment leap out and surprise me. Much to my dismay, nothing leapt out.

C.E. Murphy

#72. Unconditional Love is a perpetual emotion machine. It inspires us to include others. The longer I am bathed in its radiance, the more I find myself looking at others with an open heart. I can look past their faults and love them. I can say, "I may not like the things you do, but I love you.

Rosa Marchisella

#73. For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.

Anna Funder

#74. Both European and American historians have done away with any conceptual limits on what in the past needs and deserves investigating. The result, among other things, has been a flood of works on gender history, black history, and ethnic history of all kinds.

Edmund Morgan

#75. I stay in that state of mind for the next couple of days, in the places that only exist in the past. The things you can't undo get lodged in the darkest corners of your mind, where nothing ever seems to get solved, just recycled into new anxiety.

Caroline Burau

#76. We learn nothing of very much importance when it can be explained entirely in terms of past experience. If it were possible to understand all things in terms of what we know already, we could convey the sense of color to a blind man with nothing but sound, taste, touch, and smell.

Alan W. Watts

#77. My life can be so arranged that I can live on whatever I have. If I cannot live as I have lived in the past, I shall live differently, and living differently does not mean living with less attention to the things that make life gracious and pleasant or with less enjoyment of things of the mind.

Eleanor Roosevelt

#78. The conventional notions of art have changed, and a lot of things done today are considered works of art that would have been rejected in the past.

David Rockefeller

#79. In the past we used to come over to see what was going on in London or Paris or Milan or wherever - it's pretty much the same stuff everywhere [now], and people are wearing the same things, because it's all instantaneous with the Internet.

Paul Weller

#80. He taught me not to dwell or attach myself to things from the past that were no longer useful, and that sentimentality was for people who did not want to move forward in this world.

Gemma Liviero

#81. You cannot step twice into the same river, said Herakleitos. People in the past were not just like us; to pretend so is an evasion and a betrayal, turning our back on them so as to be easy among familiar things.

Mary Renault

#82. On the mountains of memory by the world's wellsprings, in all man's eyes, where the light of life of him is on all past things, death only dies.

Algernon Charles Swinburne

#83. A nation is a body of people who have done great things together in the past and hope to do great things together in the future.

Frank Underhill

#84. I don't write diaries and things like that, but I have a fantastic memory. I call that like a magic carpet. I can really concentrate and travel back in the past I don't know how many years from now and evoke that space if I wanted.

Francoise Gilot

#85. We didn't have to be defined by the things we did or didn't do in the past. Some people allow themselves to be controlled by regret. Maybe it's regret, maybe it's not. It's merely something that happened. Get over it.
- John, I Am Number Four

Pittacus Lore

#86. In the past year I've learned that love can make you do crazy, silly, stupid, ridiculous things. And the fact that one person can make you feel this way and do those things is amazing to me.

Allie Everhart

#87. But my point is these Civil War songs were gruesome. The hatred that's so bad in this country today, and for the past 10 or 15 years, bad as it is, is nothing compared to the kind of things people would write down and sing back in the Civil War.

T Bone Burnett

#88. You are only happy in life if you forget the bad things and focus on the good things

Jeroen Saey

#89. While in the past we may have wanted loyal employees, today we need flexible people who are not possessive about "the way things are done around here." And

Spencer Johnson

#90. I do so many things. Like when I was younger, if I drove past a house that I didn't want to live in, I'd hold my breath. Driving around somewhere like Slough I'd go blue in the face.

Jessica Brown Findlay

#91. I've asked you fifty questions and still have no sense of your life, your family, what you care about. They want to know about you, Katniss."
"But I don't want them to! They're already taking my future! They can't have the things that mattered to time in the past!" I say.

Suzanne Collins

#92. A creative person has to be alive. He can't borrow from things he's done in the past. He can't let his method choose his subjects or his characters. They can't be warped to fit his style.

John Steinbeck

#93. The past is like a handful of dust. It filters through your fingers, disappearing little by little. I wish, for one day, I could go back. In another life I would do things differently.

Katy Perry

#94. There are many things that have stayed consistent. But the biggest change, of course, is technology, the way it's used, the way films are shot, the format that they're shot in, and the way films, of course, are edited. It's very different than it was in the past.

Howard Shore

#95. For me, the best things in life - meaningful work, meaningful relationships, interesting experiences, good food, sleep, music, ideas, sex, and other basic needs and pleasures - are not, past a certain point, materially improved upon by having a lot of money.

Ray Dalio

#96. I don't mind letting people in a little bit, but I have learned from the past not to talk too much about my relationships and to keep things as private as possible.

Leona Lewis

#97. Something even minor I do is going to be reported because of things that have happened in the past. You have to be aware of that.

Patrick Kane

#98. And in the evening
After the fire and the light
One thing is certain: Nothing can hold back the light
Time is relentless
And as the past disappears
We're on the verge of all things new

Billy Joel

#99. I don't regret anything I do, ever, whether articles I've done or things I've said. And as far as what's happened in the past, I wouldn't take anything back.

Eva Longoria

#100. It was cold and barren. It was no longer the view that I remembered. The sunshine of her presence was far from me. The charm of her voice no longer murmured in my ear.

Wilkie Collins