Things Past Quotes

#1. 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

#2. I once listed all the good things I did over the past year, and then turned them into resolution form and backdated them. That was a good feeling

Robert Fulghum

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. We should try to achieve things for ourselves and not rely on former or past family glories with which we have no connection but the arbitrary nature of our birth.

Shirley Franklin

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. We can't remember things from our future; remembering is merely the privilege and the beauty of the past!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#12. Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity suggests layers of things, the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.

W.G. Sebald

#13. Obviously, I'm still building a name and reputation for myself. The stigmas that come with my past will remain there for quite some time, but I'm not afraid to challenge those things, and I never have been.

Sasha Grey

#14. We had to get past the mechanical film age to be able to explore other things, but it will be interesting.

Peter Jackson

#15. I've always had the wish, the nostalgia to be able to write detective novels. At heart, the principal themes of detective novels are close to the things that obsess me: disappearance, the problems of identity, amnesia, the return to an enigmatic past.

Patrick Modiano

#16. 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

#17. If you look and listen for it, you'll see and hear synchronistic clues from the Universe that go past everyone else but have special meaning for you, guiding you to make the best of things. Look for synchronistic "winks" from the Universe.

Bill Harvey

#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. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. Embrace and love all of yourself - past, present, and future. Forgive yourself quickly and as often as necessary. Encourage yourself. Tell yourself good things about yourself.

Melody Beattie

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

Ayn Rand

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

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

Marcus Aurelius

#28. I used to think that I wouldn't change anything from my past, because doing so would inevitably affect who I am now. But considering my current state, I'm thinking it might not be a bad idea to go back in time to fix things.

Megan McCafferty

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. I remember saying things, but I have no idea what was said. It was generally a friendly conversation. - Associated Press reporter Jack Sullivan, attempting to recount a 3 A.M. exchange we had at a dinner party and inadvertently describing the past ten years of my life.

Chuck Klosterman

#32. I might be many things, but I am also smart enough to learn from the past. Smart enough to know that no man who oozes so much alpha male will be happy with a woman who isn't weak. Or, he won't settle until he makes me weak, and I will never be that bitch.

Harper Sloan

#33. 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

#34. Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal 'security,' those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists - they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.

Pope Francis

#35. There's no need for us to be held back by the past or how things have been so far. The important thing is what seeds we are sowing now for the future.

Daisaku Ikeda

#36. It's not about being upset about the things you might have said or done yesterday, which is quite appropriate at the moment. It's about looking forward rather than looking back. I hate people who look back on the past or talk about what might have been.

Noel Gallagher

#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. There are vistas never dreamed of, there are joys never even known, there are glories no past glory ever surpassed. These wait for you but only if you accept my legacy and help bring these things about.

L. Ron Hubbard

#39. 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

#40. In a human development sense, our understanding of leadership has essentially "grown up" and moved past personal ego and a self-centered view of things.

Linda Fisher Thornton

#41. The enemy uses all his power to lead the Christian, and above all the minister, to neglect prayer. He knows that however admirable the sermon may be, however attractive the service, however faithful the pastoral visitation, none of these things can damage him or his kingdom if prayer is neglected.

Andy Murray

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. Until you're willing to accept what already is - the things of your past that you can't change - there's no space for you to create what you want. Acceptance is the key to unlocking the door to true peace, happiness, and freedom.

Hal Elrod

#45. You can lose your past by forgetting it but you can never lose your future because you can lose only the things you already own!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#46. 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

#47. I was treating the past as if it could be mined for clues, for reasons.
But the past resists that.
It holds too much evidence of too many things.

David Levithan

#48. 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

#49. It is more rational to suspect knavery and folly than to discount, at a stroke, everything that past experience has taught me about the way things actually work

David Hume

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. The idea of being all things to all people is a thing of the past.

Michael Dell

#54. History is above all else an argument. It is an argument between different historians; and, perhaps, an argument between the past and the present, an argument between what actually happened, and what is going to happen next. Arguments are important; they create the possibility of changing things.

John H. Arnold

#55. All things are taken from us, and become Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. All things fell into the past but one; and what that was, was love.

Justin Cronin

#59. Resentment and bitterness and old grudges were dead things, which rotted the hands that grasped them.

Winston Graham

#60. 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

#61. I loved her for so long. Our past trails behind us like a comet's tail, the future stretched out before us like the universe. Things happen. People get lost and love breaks.

Jonathan Tropper

#62. The bandstand is an incredible space. It is really a sacred space. One of the things that is really sacred about it is that you have no opportunity to think about the future, or the past.

Stefon Harris

#63. 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

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

John Wooden

#65. Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass, though but slowly.

Leonardo Da Vinci

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. When the season transforms the weather, When leaves fall and nights grow long, That's the time when the spirits gather, They might scare you, but I never fear. I walk past the graveyard and sing a song, Cuz things aren't always as they appear.

Bryant Delafosse

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. You can only predict things after they have happened.

Eugene Ionesco

#73. All remembrance of things past is fiction.

Ernest Hemingway,

#74. 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

#75. A relationship is NOT about your new partner to hear the things you didn't tell your ex's and for you to live on the fear of past relationship(s) ... BUT sometimes the person cannot love you as much as you appreciate yourself.

Coco Nicole Estef

#76. Doubting things go ill often hurts more
Than to be sure they do; for certainties
Either are past remedies, or, timely knowing,
The remedy then born.

William Shakespeare

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. I shall stay and tell my tale, hope that it may serve some purpose, that eyes shall see it and learn, that the future will not repeat the mistakes of the past. That is my prayer, but what use is prayer to a god that has abandoned all things . . .

John Gwynne

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. The memories you have are just recordings of things past, not chains to bind you.

Michael Dolan

#86. Blaming things on the past does not make them better.

Nelson Mandela

#87. All of the great achievers of the past have been visionary figures; they were men and women who projected into the future. They thought of what could be, rather than what already was, and then they moved themselves into action, to bring these things into fruition.

Bob Proctor

#88. Sometimes to truly move forward, you have to leave your past behind you,

That includes many things, and many people who were a part of it.

Michael Linen

#89. All things pass ... Perhaps the passage of time is a kind of healing, or a kind of salvation granted equally to all people.

Mizuki Nomura

#90. I did have regrets these past six months," he told me quietly. "I found it a curse as much as a blessing, all that time to think. About the things I could have said, that I should have told you ...

Karen Chance

#91. I was the future and shall be the past - I am a timeless, everlasting Now, so short I have no end, so long I have no duration.

Nanamoli Thera

#92. There are things that once done can't be undone, things that once said can't be unsaid.

Lisa Gardner

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. By how much one man has more experience of things past, than another, by so much also he is more prudent, and his expectations the seldomer fail him.

Thomas Hobbes

#96. 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

#97. I don't rehash the past. It's my baggage. That's all. I accept things as they are.

Roman Polanski

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. 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