Top 100 The Dead Past Quotes
#1. Trust no future, however pleasant! Let the dead past bury its dead! Act
act in the living Present! Heart within and God overhead.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#2. That's what I meant when I said that about the cheek of Woman as a sex. What I mean is, after what had happened, you'd have thought she would have preferred to let the dead past bury its dead, and all that sort of thing, what?
P.G. Wodehouse
#3. Memory, the priestess, kills the present and offers its heart to the shrine of the dead past.
Rabindranath Tagore
#4. All the strength and succour you want is within yourselves. Therefore make your own future. "Let the dead past bury its dead." The infinite future is before you.
Swami Vivekananda
#5. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people spend their days either living in the dead past or the imagined future. This sort of mental activity cheats a person out of the most precious time we have ... NOW. Give everything you have to what you are doing NOW and life will richly reward you.
Bob Proctor
#7. Texas is my mind's country, that place I most want to understand and record and preserve. Four generations of my people sleep in its soil; I have children there, and a grandson; the dead past and the living future tie me to it.
Larry L. King
#8. I have everything I need to enjoy my here and now - unless I am letting my consciousness be dominated by demands and expectations based on the dead past or the imagined future.
Ken Keyes Jr.
#9. It smells like the past. But not the dead past. It's so alive.
Deborah Harkness
#10. There was no warning before the outbreaks began. One day, things were normal; the next, people who were supposedly dead were getting up and attacking anything that came into range. This was upsetting for everyone involved, except for the infected, who were past being upset about that sort of thing.
Mira Grant
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. The past is dead except for the life you give it
Myles Munroe
#14. And here I sit, writing about him as though he's just a ghost from my past that still haunts me. And I guess that is all he is now. Just some guy I used to know.
Dawn Kurtagich
#15. You list the dead. You tell the stories of the past. You write about the catastrophes and the massacres. What about the living, Finnikin? Who honors them?
Melina Marchetta
#16. Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past.
William Faulkner
#17. I had feelings: passive as I lived, little as I spoke, cold as I looked, when I thought of past days, I could feel. About the present, it was better to be stoical; about the future - such a future as mine - to be dead.
Charlotte Bronte
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.
William Morris
#21. I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.
Jeanette Winterson
#23. When someone points out your past mistakes, look at them dead in the eyes and follow with, 'and I'd do it all again to have the life I have now.
Dan Pearce
#24. The pathway traced with blood and tears,
and dust of all our father's dead,
Whose backward footsteps, wandering, red,
Fade to the mist of nameless years.
("The Testimony of the Suns")
George Sterling
#25. For every moment that is past, the angel of death keeps taking the part that is dead and we keeping living in the present. The parasite wants us to carry the past with us and that makes it so heavy to be alive.
Miguel Ruiz
#26. Resentment and bitterness and old grudges were dead things, which rotted the hands that grasped them.
Winston Graham
#27. New York has no truck with the past. It expels its dead.
Luc Sante
#28. I wish all the dead ideas would stay dead.
Marty Rubin
#30. -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
#31. The past stood at my shoulder, naked and defenseless as all dead things, as though it were time itself that had been laid open by the fall of the mountain.
Gene Wolfe
#32. When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered ... the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls ... bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory
Marcel Proust
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive.
Thomas Carlyle
#37. As the future ripens in the past, so the past rots in the future
a terrible festival of dead leaves.
Anna Akhmatova
#38. Things change whether you want them to, or not
unless you are dead. Don't hold so hard to the past that you die with it.
Patricia Briggs
#39. I had this daft idea to come and bury the past. Except the past is not quite dead.
Sherry Thomas
#40. The woods are hush'd, their music is no more; The leaf is dead, the yearning past away; New leaf, new life
the days of frost are o'er; New life, new love, to suit the newer day: New loves are sweet as those that went before: Free love
free field
we love but while we may.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#41. If I speak of Vienna it must be in the past tense, as a man speaks of a woman he has loved and who is dead.
Erich Von Stroheim
#42. The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?
D.H. Lawrence
#43. Could we live it over again, Were it worth the pain, Could the passionate past that is fled Call back its dead!
Oscar Wilde
#44. Let no-one say the past is dead, the past is all about us and within.
Oodgeroo Noonuccal
#45. You are either in here or you are in nowhere, because both the past and the future are nowhere; past is dead, future is not born yet!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#46. I was a terrible history student. They taught me history as if it were a visit to a wax museum or to the land of the dead. I was over twenty before I discovered that the past was neither quiet nor mute.
Eduardo Galeano
#47. No sooner are her glass toes thrust into the mud grave than the revolutions begin. Uprisings, fire and steel. The prince is lynched in the ballroom with the dead girl's hair. Royalty's a thing of the past. The kingdom chooses their monarch.
Naturally, they elect a wolf.
Allyse Near
#48. When Jesus Christ comes back, it is not the liberal politicians who ought to be trembling, it's the pastors ... because so many men have built their 'ministries' on the dry dead bones of
unconverted church members.
Paul Washer
#49. sometimes she felt that it was necessary for her very existence that she should free herself from the past; at others, that the past had completely displaced the present, which, when one resumed life after a morning among the dead, proved to be of an utterly thin and inferior composition.
Virginia Woolf
#50. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
Italo Calvino
#51. Forget the past, let the dead bury the dead. Things were working out fine, and that was the only thing he had to remember.
Robert Bloch
#52. Down the dank mouldering paths and past the Ocean's streams they went
and past the White Rock and the Sun's Western Gates and past
the Land of Dreams, and soon they reached the fields of asphodel
where the dead, the burnt-out wraiths of mortals make their home
Homer
#53. Two girls walk past in gargantuan heels and dresses so tight that their skin is spilling out, and one of them says to the other, "Wait, who the fuck is Lewis Carroll?" and in my imagination I pull a gun out of my pocket, shoot them both and then shoot myself.
Alice Oseman
#54. The past wasn't dead, nor past. She herself was black, and was explaining the demographic of the Black Belt today by referring to slavery, still a visitable memory because of the persistence of its effects.
Paul Theroux
#55. In the West the past is like a dead animal. It is a carcass picked at by the flies that call themselves historians and biographers. But in my culture the past lives. My people feel this way in part because death does not separate us from our ancestors.
Miriam Makeba
#56. Who hurt you?" she asked, slicing through the two other conversations going on at the table. "He's dead," said Charles, his hand sliding up Anna's back reassuringly. "I killed him. If I could, I would bring him back to life so I could kill him again.
Patricia Briggs
#57. Whoever neglects the arts when he is young has lost the past and is dead to the future.
Sophocles
#58. All progress in literary style lies in the heroic resolve to cast aside accretions and exuberances, all the conventions of a past age that were once beautiful because alive and are now false because dead.
Havelock Ellis
#60. Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a sombre graveyard of dead books.
Carlos Fuentes
#61. If you're going to bury the past, bury it deep, girl. Shallow Graves always give up their dead.
Jennifer Donnelly
#62. Life is much too short to waste time wallowing in the past especially when the future hands you a second chance.
Chakotay Talking to B'Ellana (When she asks him why he isn't mad her for lying about her and Miral being dead)
Book:Unworthy: pg. 121
Kirsten Beyer
#63. Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
Walter Benjamin
#64. She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds.
Vladimir Nabokov
#65. The past is discredited because it is not modern. Not to be modern is the great sin. So, perhaps, it is. But every one has, in his day, been modern. And surely even modernity is a poor thing beside immortality. Since we must all die, is it not perhaps better to be a dead lion than a living dog?
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
#66. It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.
Billy Collins
#68. I thought, When the past dies, we mourn for the dead. When the future dies, we mourn for ourselves.
Gloria Steinem
#69. For the past few weeks I have been laboring under the assumption that if people thought I was dead, they would stop annoying me and leave me alone.
I didn't respond right away. I examined his statement from every angle, and while I admired the logic, the cockeyed optimism left me cold.
Gary Reilly
#70. Tem loved the mortuaries, though no one he knew was dead. Still he would beg to go, to grasp the hand of any adult willing to wind down those plush-carpeted stairways, past the sleek vaults, inviting and bright.
Katharine E.K. Duckett
#71. Our personal past is only available to us now through black-and-white film, it's a medium for communication with the dead, including our dead selves, the way we used to be, which is why we're drawn to it.
Frank Lentricchia
#72. I don't have any home. Everyone I grew up with, my family, are all dead. So I feel kind of like a ghost. I'm more interested in the past.
James Purdy
#73. Nhb stared at the blade reverently. Here was a token of past victories and the valor of long dead people. "With this I can fulfill my duty to my people and defeat the Shadow," Nhb thought.
Rachel Wetsriru
#74. She must face the forest of her mother's past in order to save herself and the one she loves.
Carrie Ryan
#75. The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.
Walter Benjamin
#76. The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
Edward Thomas
#77. Merlin, do you mind?' It was the King who asked me, a man as old and wise as myself; a man who could see past his own crowding problems, and guess what it might men to me, to walk in dead air where once the world had been a god-filled garden.
Mary Stewart
#78. By a series of violent shocks, the nations in succession have struggled to shake off the Past, to reverse the action of Time and the verdict of success, and to rescue the world from the reign of the dead.
John Acton
#79. In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles ... Contemporary or postmodernist art ... will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past.
Fredric Jameson
#80. Sex exists in the now without past or future. If, for a single second, your minds drifts back to the past or forwards into the unknown, the moment withers like a dead plant and the passage of pleasure turns to a road of dust.
Chloe Thurlow
#81. The past is not dead; it is not even past. People live on inner time; the moment in which a decisive thought or feeling takes place can be at any time. Timeless feelings are common to all of us.
Martha Graham
#82. It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.
Oscar Wilde
#83. We hold reunions, not for the dead, for there is nothing in all the earth that you and I can do for the dead. They are past our help and past our praise. We can add to them no glory, we can give to them no immortality. They do not need us, but forever and forever more we need them.
James A. Garfield
#84. One day, when all the continents have been buried in ocean, we'll slowly float past each other in our little boats, hearing our own hearts in each other's chest, and watch each other like stars we don't know are dead.
Zachary Schomburg
#85. And it occurs to me that there's no real difference between us, the living and the dead; it's just a matter of tense: past-dead and future-dead
Rick Yancey
#86. In my collection, to me at least, the theatre of the past lives again and those long-dead playwrights and actors have in me an enthralled audience of one, and I applaud them across the centuries.
Robertson Davies
#87. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
John Maynard Keynes
#88. We are all our own graveyards, I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived, and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.
Clive Barker
#89. What is past is not dead; it is not even past. We cut ourselves off from it; we pretend to be strangers.
Christa Wolf
#90. The past is dead, let's focus on tomorrow instead.
Greg Graffin
#91. The judgment: You are now before Yama, King of the Dead. In vain will you try to ... deny or conceal the evil deeds you have done ... the mirror in which Yama seems to read your past is your own memory, and also his judgment is your own. It is you yourself who pronounce your own judgment, ...
Gautama Buddha
#92. The past isn't dead. It isn't even past. - William Faulkner
Tim Powers
#93. History was a way to live extra lives, to cheat the limits of flesh and blood, to roll the rock back from the tomb and free the resurrected dead.
Tony Hendra
#94. For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.
Thomas Sowell
#95. And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. That is what all of us historical researchers believe. And we love truth.
Robert Penn Warren
#96. The past is dead; The future is imaginary; Happiness can only be in the Eternal Now Moment.
Ken Keyes Jr.
#97. Earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen.
G.K. Chesterton
#98. The past has shaped me, molded me into a monster. A monster with a persecuted heart and a dead soul.
J.A. Redmerski
#99. The chime wasn't the most pleasant sound in the world to wake up to, but Eric had awakened to far worse in the past. Gunfire was always a sure way to go from dead to the world to more alive than you'd ever been, assuming none of the bullets actually struck you.
Evan Currie
#100. History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.
Robin Hobb
