Quotes about Past

Mesmerized, all she can do is watch this piece of her life move off; all she can do is watch it and suffer. She is experiencing a brand-new feeling called nostalgia. That feeling, that irrepressible yearning to return, suddenly reveals to her the existence of the past, the power of the past, of her past; in the house of her life […] from now on her existence will be inconceivable without these feelings.

The past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a love the way we reread a book or resee a film.

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

The past, the future, majesty, love - if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them.

And if you were always spending your time getting over your past, how were you supposed to get on with your future?

In the past, we probably did suffer from one thing or another. It may even have felt like a kind of hell. If we remember that suffering, not letting ourselves get carried away by it, we can use it to remind ourselves, How lucky I am right now. I'm not in that situation. I can be happy.

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.

Time, though in Eternity, applied to motion, measures all things durable by present, past, and future.

Many of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.

My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me.

Emelina and I took each other in. All morning I'd felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.

This power of choice means that we are not merely a product of our past or of our genes; we are not a product of how other people treat us. They unquestionably influence us, but they do not determine us. We are self-determining through our choices. If we have given away our present to the past, do we need to give away our future also?