Quotes about Past

When he saw the River again he knew it at once. He should have; it was now ineradicably a part of his past, his life; it would be a part of what he would bequeath, if that were in store for him.

Il passato non è morto e sepolto. In realtà non è neppure passato

We may be through with our past, but the past isn't through with us.

The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

Life is for living, for moving on, for letting the past lie behind us.

Philosophy is like science and unlike history in that it seeks general truths rather than an account of particular events, either in the near or distant past.

If we live with possibilities we are exiles from the present which is given us by God to be our own, homeless and displaced in a future or a past which are not ours because they are always beyond our reach. The present is our right place, and we can lay hands on whatever it offers us.

Memory is fragile and capricious; each of us remembers and forgets according to what is convenient. The past is a notebook with many leaves on which we jot down our lives with ink that changes according to our state of mind.

I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously—as the three Mora sisters said, who could see the spirits of all eras mingled in space.

They're not dead, Lenny. They're more alive now than ever. That's what happens with age: stories from the past come alive and stick to our skin. I'm so pleased we're going to spend the next few years together.

Grace meant God knew her past and still offered her a beautiful future. An unbreakable happy ending.

We cannot change our past. We can not change the fact that people act in a certain way. We can not change the inevitaable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.