When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.
- Lynn Abbey
I do not want to go back to the past; I want to go back to the past way of facing the future.
- Ronald Reagan
He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.
- Theodor Adorno
Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
- James Joyce
We learn in the past, but we are not the result of that. We suffered in the past, loved in the past, cried and laughed in the past, but that's of no use in the present. The present has its challenges, its good and bad side. We can neither blame nor be grateful to the past for what is happening now. Each new experience of love has nothing whatsoever to do with past experiences. It's always new.
- Paulo Coelho
The warlock's gaze, on the flames, was remote and distant, as if he were looking back into the past. Simon couldn't help but remember what Magnus had said to him once, about living forever:
Someday you and I will be the only two left.
- Cassandra Clare
You will notice that what we are aiming at when we fall in love is a very strange paradox. The paradox consists of the fact that, when we fall in love, we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attached as children. On the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted upon us. So that love contains in it the contradiction: The attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past.
- Woody Allen
Sometimes I think I live more closely to the past than the present.
- Patricia Briggs
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
Times of terror and the deepest misery may arrive, but if there is to be any happiness in this misery it can only be a spiritual happiness, related to the past in the rescue of the culture of early ages and to the future in a serene and indefatigable championship of the spirit in a time which would otherwise completely swallow up the material.
- Hermann Hesse
When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past... And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.
- Jean Anouilh
We were each other's only link to the past... that was the strength of our bond, and also our weakness.
- Lisa Kleypas
It seemed important to figure out how much of the attraction I felt for Hardy came from now, as opposed to the past. If we had met now. for the first time, as strangers, would I have felt the same about him?
I couldn't have said for certain.
- Lisa Kleypas
Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.
- W H Auden
Do not belong to the past dawns,but to the noons of future
- Sri Aurobindo
Adolescence represents an inner emotional upheaval, a struggle between the eternal human wish to cling to the past and the equally powerful wish to get on with the future.
- Louise J Kaplan
One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
- Gaston Bachelard
For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ('this-has-been'), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.
- Roland Barthes
That sensation of a void within which never left us, that irrational longing to hark back to the past or else to speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire.
- Albert Camus
I had wanted to live forever as a gypsy girl; I had wanted to live forever as a child, tumbling down a rabbit hole. I had been granted both wishes, only to find immortality was not what it had promised to be; instead of a passport to the future, it was a yoke that bound me to the past.
- Melanie Benjamin
There is no such thing as a good or bad ad in isolation. What is good at one moment is bad at another. Research can trap you into the past.
- William Bernbach
I'd rather welcome change than cling to the past.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.
- Corrie Ten Boom
The beauty of the past belongs to the past.
- Margaret Bourkewhite
As I held the family Bible in my hand and I could almost feel the joys and sorrows that connected me to the past.
- Nancy B Brewer
For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.
- John F Kennedy
Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.
- John F Kennedy
It takes far less courage to cling to the past than it does to face the future.
- Sandra Brown
We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.
- John Buchan
Like Spain, I am bound to the past.
- William S Burroughs
It isn't good to hold on too hard to the past. You can't spend your whole life looking back. Not even when you can't see what lies ahead. All you can do is keep on keeping on, and try to believe that tomorrow will be what it should beeven if it isn't what you expected.
- Jim Butcher
When it comes to the past, we all stack the deck.
- Stephen King
I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.
- Ron Chernow
The real differences around the world today are not between Jews and Arabs; Protestants and Catholics; Muslims, Croats, and Serbs. The real differences are between those who embrace peace and those who would destroy it. Between those who look to the future and those who cling to the past. Between those who open their arms and those who are determined to clench their fists.
- Bill Clinton
...this is the room where the future pours into the past via the pinch of now.
- Terry Pratchett
Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship's wake, and vanish into a great silence in which your ship moves on with a sort of magical effect.
- Joseph Conrad
Taste refers to the past, imagination to the future.
- Mason Cooley
But she's the Pastor's wife... Do you not understand the irony of this whole situation?" he said clearly enjoying himself. "One evil being at your door, kissing the hand of your adopted mother who's married to the Pastor with whom you live. You, the sweet, innocent, unscathed mate of my twin brother who renounces what he is, but is also...an evil being. I mean, you can't write this stuff.
- Shelly Crane
You can't hang on to the past and you certainly can't throw a wobbly every time something happens that you don't like.
- Shelly Crane
It is all falling indelibly into the past.
- Don Delillo
The book begins and ends with the visits to give the impression of a tunnel into their ancestors and family history. I believe in going backwards into the past - I felt I was digging a tunnel back to the past.
- Anita Desai
If you don't pay attention to the past, you'll never understand the future.It's all linked together.
- Sarah Dessen
No matter how much time has passed, these things still affect us and the world we live in. If you don't pay attention to the past, you'll never understand the future. It's all linked together.
- Sarah Dessen
America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.
- Frederick Douglass
Composers are always going back to the past.
- Anne Dudley
We go to the past to lay the blame - since the past can't argue. We go to our past selves to account for our present miseries.
- Glen Duncan
Polls are frequently taken to try to tease out or determine likely directions and trends, but once taken, they belong to the past, requiring that new polls be taken.
- Alan Dundes
Where are the links of the chain... joining us to the past?
- Dorothy Dunnett
There was so much force and beauty in the windows, such unsettled sadness in what little I knew of Rose's life, all her longing, her distance from her daughter. Just knowing she had existed opened new and uneasy possibilities within my understanding of the story I'd always thought I'd known by heart.... Whoever Rose had been, she was gone, unable to speak for herself, fading into the past as surely as these rainy colors were diffusing, even now [p. 142].
- Kim Edwards
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink greetings!
- George Orwell
[Winston writes in his forbidden diary]
Winston Smith: April the 4th, 1984. To the past, or to the future. To an age when thought is free. From the Age of Big Brother, from the Age of the Thought Police, from a dead man... greetings.
- George Orwell
If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say this or that even, it never happenedthat, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.
- George Orwell
The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep.
- Loren Eiseley
Time is like a river flowing endlessly through the universe. And if you poled your flatboat in that river you might fight your way against the current and travel upstream into the past. Or go with the flow and rush into the future. This was in a less cynical time before toxic waste dumping and pollution filled the waterway of Chronus with the detritus of empty hours wasted minutes years of repetition and time that has been killed.
- Harlan Ellison
I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.
- Jeffrey Eugenides
Look to the past to help create the future. Look to science and to poetry. Combine innovation and interpretation. We need the best of both. And it is universities that best provide them.
- Drew Gilpin Faust
I could not imagine that the future I was walking toward could compare in any way to the past that I was leaving behind.
- Nelson Mandela
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
- F Scott Fitzgerald
It eluded us then, but that's no mattertomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And then one fine morning
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
- F Scott Fitzgerald
So we beat on, boats aaginst the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
- F Scott Fitzgerald
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
- F Scott Fitzgerald
So we beat on, boats agains the current. Borne back ceaselessly into the past.
- F Scott Fitzgerald
It is painful to break the sad links to the past
- Victor Hugo
Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow's joy is possible only if today's makes way for it; that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one.
- Andre Gide
Children understand that 'once upon a time' refers not only--not even primarily--to the past, but to the impalpable regions of the present, the deeper places inside us where princes and dragons, wizards and talking birds, impassable roads, impossible tasks, and happy endings have always existed, alive and bursting with psychic power.
- Stephen Mitchell
Huizi would say, never look back to the past. Never regret. Even if there is emptiness ahead, never look back.
- Xiaolu Guo
I will practice coming back to the present moment...not letting regrets and sorrow drag me back into the past or letting anxieties, fears, or cravings pull me out..
- Nhat Hanh
To dwell in the here and now does not mean you never think about the past or responsibly plan for the futurre. The idea is simply not to allow yourself to get lost in regrets about hte past or worriees about hte future. i fyou are firmly grounded in the present moment, the past can be an object of inquiry, the object of your mindfulness and concentration. you can attain many insights by looking into the past. But you are still grounded in the present moment.
- Nhat Hanh
I'm attracted to the past.
- Tom Stoppard
There is a lack of critical assessment of the past. But you have to understand that the current ruling elite is actually the old ruling elite. So they are incapable of a self-critical approach to the past.
- Ryszard Kapuscinski
My grandmother was overwhelmed by what was happening to us. She ahd moved back into the past because the here and the now was too terrible.
- Alice Hoffman
The essence of statesmanship is not a rigid adherence to the past, but a prudent and probing concern for the future.
- Hubert H Humphrey
We should kill the future, so the present has no choice but to retreat into the past.
- Jarod Kintz
You left me.
Not realizing until I've said my final good-bye and closed the door behind me, that he's not referring to the past.
He's prophesying our future.
- Alyson Noel
If you never left anything or anyone there would be no room for the new. Naturally, to move on is an infidelity -- to others, to the past, to old notions of oneself. Perhaps every day should contain at least one essential infidelity or necessary betrayal. It would be an optimistic, hopeful act, guaranteeing belief in the future -- a declaration that things can be not only different but better.
- Hanif Kureishi
Let them look to the past, but let them also look to the future; let them look to the land of their ancestors, but let them look also to the land of their children.
- Wilfrid Laurier
Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.
- C S Lewis
Nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust and ambition look ahead.
- C S Lewis
And to go forward, you need to get rid of your anger. And in order to do that, you need to go back to the past," Mike said.
"You sound like a fortune cookie.
- Amy Lignor
Look not mournfully into the past, it comes not back again. Wisely improve the present, it is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future without fear and with a manly heart.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Because the one who wishes it isn't the one who, still untouched by the future, stands at the crossroads. Instead, it is the one marked by the future become past who wants to go back to the past, to revoke the irrevocable. And would he want to revoke it if he hadn't suffered it?
- Pascal Mercier
The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.
- Yukio Mishima
... hope resides in the future, while perspective and wisdom are almost always found by looking to the past.
- Greg Mortenson
It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down...
- Kate Morton
Was life like that? You could look ahead to the future or back to the past, but the present moved too quickly to absorb.
- Brandon Mull
It was the tenderness mingled with melancholy which we bring to a time that belongs irrevocably to the past, when a pale, delicate shadow rises from it bearing the lilies of the dead, and in it we find a forgotten likeness to ourselves.
And that faint, wistful shadow, that pale scent, seemed to vanish away into a wide, full, warm stream the life that now lay open before him.
- Robert Musil
As to the past, I would not mind retrieving from various corners of space-time certain lost comforts, such as baggy trousers and long, deep bathtubs.
- Vladimir Nabokov
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
- Pablo Neruda
Ryan is my bridge to the past, to memories that lose some of their sting when he recounts them.
- Tatum Oneal
But we were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past. We sailed into the past.
- Michael Ondaatje
They spend their time looking forward to the past.
- John Osborne
Most people gaze neither into the past nor the future; they explore neither truth nor lies. They gaze at the television.
- Radiohead
Creeds and castes, and all forms of intellectual and emotional grouping, belong to the past.
- Herbert Read
In the old days, I'd never given a thought to the future, and not much to the past. I'd lived simply in the now. I'd been happy if I had enough to eat, and nobody was hitting me. I'd been miserable when I was cold and frightened when I was ill, but mostly I gave no more thought than an animal did to what might happen tomorrow, or next week. Just an animal walking about on two legs, that's all I was till Myrddin changed me. It seemd to me sometimes I'd been happier that way.
- Philip Reeve
Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
- Adrienne Rich
PICARD: There is no greater challenge than the study of philosophy.
WESLEY: But William James won't be in my Starfleet exams.
PICARD: The important things never will be. Anyone can be trained in the mechanics of piloting a starship.
WESLEY: But Starfleet Academy
PICARD: It takes more. Open your mind to the past. Art, history, philosophy. And all this may mean something.
- Gene Roddenberry
She watched him recede into the past as he stood...each successive moment of him passing before her eyes and being lost forever.
- Salman Rushdie
Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.
- Edward Said
Let us not look back to the past with anger, nor towards the future with fear, but look around with awareness.
- James Thurber
I don't want to return to the past. I don't yearn for when I was 18 years old. I was in high school then. I had acne. I had a terrible hairdo. I'm sure I was sporting polyester pants.
- Joe Scarborough
I wanted to make pictures where you would not know who took them. I also bring the present into the past.
- Julian Schnabel
Sometimes when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny.
- Diane Setterfield
I don't think anyone ever remembers what they were really like as kids. Adults think they do, but they don't. Photos and videos don't capture the real you, or bring back to life the person you used to be. You have to return to the past to do that.
- Darren Shan
Look to the past and remember no empire rises that sooner or later won't fall.
- Al Stewart
I think experience will teach you a combination of liberalism and conservatism. We have to be progressive and at the same time we have to retain values. We have to hold onto the past as we explore the future.
- Oliver Stone
Modern as the style of Pascal's writing is, his thought is deeply impregnated with the spirit of the Middle Ages. He belonged, almost equally, to the future and to the past.
- Lytton Strachey
One of the reasons for going back into the past is that it's almost the only place that there's any drama.
- Robert Towne
It was not possible to film in California, because all the areas are heavily built up now. Coming to Cape Town is an invitation to step into the past and recreate Los Angeles of the 1930s.
- Robert Towne
A maverick feels like he has no choice however difficult his choice of expression. In my case, it was going backwards into tonality. It seemed so wrong. The idea that progress is going into the past in a new way is very strange, even though there are precedents.
- David Del Tredici
I was always attracted to the past as a kid.
- Stanley Tucci
You mostly." Her hands went still again as her eyes stared off into the past with a look so wistful it made me ache for her. "The boys tended to take care of each other but you were too much for anyone else to handle."
I poked at the ball of yarn avoiding her eyes. "I wasn't that bad."
She smiled. "You broke Ethan's arm."
"It was self-defense. He wouldn't let go of my foot."
"He was helping you tie your shoe.
- Rachel Vincent
I see myself as a true modernist. Even when I do a traditional gown, I give it a modern twist. I go to the past for research. I need to know what came before so I can break the rules.
- Vera Wang
Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.
- Alan Watts
The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
- Alan Watts
Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.
- Jessamyn West
Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility.... Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.
- Terry Tempest Williams
The castle? The monster? The man of learning? I only just thought of it. Surely you know that just as the momentous events of the past cast their shadows down the ages, so now, when the sun is drawing toward the dark,our own shadows race into the past to trouble mankind's dreams.
- Gene Wolfe
So with truth - there is a certain moment when one can say, this is the truth and here I put a dot, a stop, and I go to another thing. A judge has to put an end to a deliberation. But for a historian, there's never an end to the past. It can go on and on and on.
- A B Yehoshua
- Lynn Abbey
I do not want to go back to the past; I want to go back to the past way of facing the future.
- Ronald Reagan
He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the past, but to the past itself.
- Theodor Adorno
Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
- James Joyce
We learn in the past, but we are not the result of that. We suffered in the past, loved in the past, cried and laughed in the past, but that's of no use in the present. The present has its challenges, its good and bad side. We can neither blame nor be grateful to the past for what is happening now. Each new experience of love has nothing whatsoever to do with past experiences. It's always new.
- Paulo Coelho
The warlock's gaze, on the flames, was remote and distant, as if he were looking back into the past. Simon couldn't help but remember what Magnus had said to him once, about living forever:
Someday you and I will be the only two left.
- Cassandra Clare
You will notice that what we are aiming at when we fall in love is a very strange paradox. The paradox consists of the fact that, when we fall in love, we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attached as children. On the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted upon us. So that love contains in it the contradiction: The attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past.
- Woody Allen
Sometimes I think I live more closely to the past than the present.
- Patricia Briggs
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
Times of terror and the deepest misery may arrive, but if there is to be any happiness in this misery it can only be a spiritual happiness, related to the past in the rescue of the culture of early ages and to the future in a serene and indefatigable championship of the spirit in a time which would otherwise completely swallow up the material.
- Hermann Hesse
When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past... And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.
- Jean Anouilh
We were each other's only link to the past... that was the strength of our bond, and also our weakness.
- Lisa Kleypas
It seemed important to figure out how much of the attraction I felt for Hardy came from now, as opposed to the past. If we had met now. for the first time, as strangers, would I have felt the same about him?
I couldn't have said for certain.
- Lisa Kleypas
Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.
- W H Auden
Do not belong to the past dawns,but to the noons of future
- Sri Aurobindo
Adolescence represents an inner emotional upheaval, a struggle between the eternal human wish to cling to the past and the equally powerful wish to get on with the future.
- Louise J Kaplan
One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
- Gaston Bachelard
For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ('this-has-been'), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.
- Roland Barthes
That sensation of a void within which never left us, that irrational longing to hark back to the past or else to speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire.
- Albert Camus
I had wanted to live forever as a gypsy girl; I had wanted to live forever as a child, tumbling down a rabbit hole. I had been granted both wishes, only to find immortality was not what it had promised to be; instead of a passport to the future, it was a yoke that bound me to the past.
- Melanie Benjamin
There is no such thing as a good or bad ad in isolation. What is good at one moment is bad at another. Research can trap you into the past.
- William Bernbach
I'd rather welcome change than cling to the past.
- Robert Kiyosaki
Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.
- Corrie Ten Boom
The beauty of the past belongs to the past.
- Margaret Bourkewhite
As I held the family Bible in my hand and I could almost feel the joys and sorrows that connected me to the past.
- Nancy B Brewer
For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.
- John F Kennedy
Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.
- John F Kennedy
It takes far less courage to cling to the past than it does to face the future.
- Sandra Brown
We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.
- John Buchan
Like Spain, I am bound to the past.
- William S Burroughs
It isn't good to hold on too hard to the past. You can't spend your whole life looking back. Not even when you can't see what lies ahead. All you can do is keep on keeping on, and try to believe that tomorrow will be what it should beeven if it isn't what you expected.
- Jim Butcher
When it comes to the past, we all stack the deck.
- Stephen King
I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.
- Ron Chernow
The real differences around the world today are not between Jews and Arabs; Protestants and Catholics; Muslims, Croats, and Serbs. The real differences are between those who embrace peace and those who would destroy it. Between those who look to the future and those who cling to the past. Between those who open their arms and those who are determined to clench their fists.
- Bill Clinton
...this is the room where the future pours into the past via the pinch of now.
- Terry Pratchett
Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship's wake, and vanish into a great silence in which your ship moves on with a sort of magical effect.
- Joseph Conrad
Taste refers to the past, imagination to the future.
- Mason Cooley
But she's the Pastor's wife... Do you not understand the irony of this whole situation?" he said clearly enjoying himself. "One evil being at your door, kissing the hand of your adopted mother who's married to the Pastor with whom you live. You, the sweet, innocent, unscathed mate of my twin brother who renounces what he is, but is also...an evil being. I mean, you can't write this stuff.
- Shelly Crane
You can't hang on to the past and you certainly can't throw a wobbly every time something happens that you don't like.
- Shelly Crane
It is all falling indelibly into the past.
- Don Delillo
The book begins and ends with the visits to give the impression of a tunnel into their ancestors and family history. I believe in going backwards into the past - I felt I was digging a tunnel back to the past.
- Anita Desai
If you don't pay attention to the past, you'll never understand the future.It's all linked together.
- Sarah Dessen
No matter how much time has passed, these things still affect us and the world we live in. If you don't pay attention to the past, you'll never understand the future. It's all linked together.
- Sarah Dessen
America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.
- Frederick Douglass
Composers are always going back to the past.
- Anne Dudley
We go to the past to lay the blame - since the past can't argue. We go to our past selves to account for our present miseries.
- Glen Duncan
Polls are frequently taken to try to tease out or determine likely directions and trends, but once taken, they belong to the past, requiring that new polls be taken.
- Alan Dundes
Where are the links of the chain... joining us to the past?
- Dorothy Dunnett
There was so much force and beauty in the windows, such unsettled sadness in what little I knew of Rose's life, all her longing, her distance from her daughter. Just knowing she had existed opened new and uneasy possibilities within my understanding of the story I'd always thought I'd known by heart.... Whoever Rose had been, she was gone, unable to speak for herself, fading into the past as surely as these rainy colors were diffusing, even now [p. 142].
- Kim Edwards
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink greetings!
- George Orwell
[Winston writes in his forbidden diary]
Winston Smith: April the 4th, 1984. To the past, or to the future. To an age when thought is free. From the Age of Big Brother, from the Age of the Thought Police, from a dead man... greetings.
- George Orwell
If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say this or that even, it never happenedthat, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.
- George Orwell
The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep.
- Loren Eiseley
Time is like a river flowing endlessly through the universe. And if you poled your flatboat in that river you might fight your way against the current and travel upstream into the past. Or go with the flow and rush into the future. This was in a less cynical time before toxic waste dumping and pollution filled the waterway of Chronus with the detritus of empty hours wasted minutes years of repetition and time that has been killed.
- Harlan Ellison
I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.
- Jeffrey Eugenides
Look to the past to help create the future. Look to science and to poetry. Combine innovation and interpretation. We need the best of both. And it is universities that best provide them.
- Drew Gilpin Faust
I could not imagine that the future I was walking toward could compare in any way to the past that I was leaving behind.
- Nelson Mandela
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
- F Scott Fitzgerald
It eluded us then, but that's no mattertomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And then one fine morning
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
- F Scott Fitzgerald
So we beat on, boats aaginst the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
- F Scott Fitzgerald
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
- F Scott Fitzgerald
So we beat on, boats agains the current. Borne back ceaselessly into the past.
- F Scott Fitzgerald
It is painful to break the sad links to the past
- Victor Hugo
Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow's joy is possible only if today's makes way for it; that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one.
- Andre Gide
Children understand that 'once upon a time' refers not only--not even primarily--to the past, but to the impalpable regions of the present, the deeper places inside us where princes and dragons, wizards and talking birds, impassable roads, impossible tasks, and happy endings have always existed, alive and bursting with psychic power.
- Stephen Mitchell
Huizi would say, never look back to the past. Never regret. Even if there is emptiness ahead, never look back.
- Xiaolu Guo
I will practice coming back to the present moment...not letting regrets and sorrow drag me back into the past or letting anxieties, fears, or cravings pull me out..
- Nhat Hanh
To dwell in the here and now does not mean you never think about the past or responsibly plan for the futurre. The idea is simply not to allow yourself to get lost in regrets about hte past or worriees about hte future. i fyou are firmly grounded in the present moment, the past can be an object of inquiry, the object of your mindfulness and concentration. you can attain many insights by looking into the past. But you are still grounded in the present moment.
- Nhat Hanh
I'm attracted to the past.
- Tom Stoppard
There is a lack of critical assessment of the past. But you have to understand that the current ruling elite is actually the old ruling elite. So they are incapable of a self-critical approach to the past.
- Ryszard Kapuscinski
My grandmother was overwhelmed by what was happening to us. She ahd moved back into the past because the here and the now was too terrible.
- Alice Hoffman
The essence of statesmanship is not a rigid adherence to the past, but a prudent and probing concern for the future.
- Hubert H Humphrey
We should kill the future, so the present has no choice but to retreat into the past.
- Jarod Kintz
You left me.
Not realizing until I've said my final good-bye and closed the door behind me, that he's not referring to the past.
He's prophesying our future.
- Alyson Noel
If you never left anything or anyone there would be no room for the new. Naturally, to move on is an infidelity -- to others, to the past, to old notions of oneself. Perhaps every day should contain at least one essential infidelity or necessary betrayal. It would be an optimistic, hopeful act, guaranteeing belief in the future -- a declaration that things can be not only different but better.
- Hanif Kureishi
Let them look to the past, but let them also look to the future; let them look to the land of their ancestors, but let them look also to the land of their children.
- Wilfrid Laurier
Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.
- C S Lewis
Nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust and ambition look ahead.
- C S Lewis
And to go forward, you need to get rid of your anger. And in order to do that, you need to go back to the past," Mike said.
"You sound like a fortune cookie.
- Amy Lignor
Look not mournfully into the past, it comes not back again. Wisely improve the present, it is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future without fear and with a manly heart.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Because the one who wishes it isn't the one who, still untouched by the future, stands at the crossroads. Instead, it is the one marked by the future become past who wants to go back to the past, to revoke the irrevocable. And would he want to revoke it if he hadn't suffered it?
- Pascal Mercier
The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.
- Yukio Mishima
... hope resides in the future, while perspective and wisdom are almost always found by looking to the past.
- Greg Mortenson
It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down...
- Kate Morton
Was life like that? You could look ahead to the future or back to the past, but the present moved too quickly to absorb.
- Brandon Mull
It was the tenderness mingled with melancholy which we bring to a time that belongs irrevocably to the past, when a pale, delicate shadow rises from it bearing the lilies of the dead, and in it we find a forgotten likeness to ourselves.
And that faint, wistful shadow, that pale scent, seemed to vanish away into a wide, full, warm stream the life that now lay open before him.
- Robert Musil
As to the past, I would not mind retrieving from various corners of space-time certain lost comforts, such as baggy trousers and long, deep bathtubs.
- Vladimir Nabokov
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
- Pablo Neruda
Ryan is my bridge to the past, to memories that lose some of their sting when he recounts them.
- Tatum Oneal
But we were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past. We sailed into the past.
- Michael Ondaatje
They spend their time looking forward to the past.
- John Osborne
Most people gaze neither into the past nor the future; they explore neither truth nor lies. They gaze at the television.
- Radiohead
Creeds and castes, and all forms of intellectual and emotional grouping, belong to the past.
- Herbert Read
In the old days, I'd never given a thought to the future, and not much to the past. I'd lived simply in the now. I'd been happy if I had enough to eat, and nobody was hitting me. I'd been miserable when I was cold and frightened when I was ill, but mostly I gave no more thought than an animal did to what might happen tomorrow, or next week. Just an animal walking about on two legs, that's all I was till Myrddin changed me. It seemd to me sometimes I'd been happier that way.
- Philip Reeve
Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
- Adrienne Rich
PICARD: There is no greater challenge than the study of philosophy.
WESLEY: But William James won't be in my Starfleet exams.
PICARD: The important things never will be. Anyone can be trained in the mechanics of piloting a starship.
WESLEY: But Starfleet Academy
PICARD: It takes more. Open your mind to the past. Art, history, philosophy. And all this may mean something.
- Gene Roddenberry
She watched him recede into the past as he stood...each successive moment of him passing before her eyes and being lost forever.
- Salman Rushdie
Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.
- Edward Said
Let us not look back to the past with anger, nor towards the future with fear, but look around with awareness.
- James Thurber
I don't want to return to the past. I don't yearn for when I was 18 years old. I was in high school then. I had acne. I had a terrible hairdo. I'm sure I was sporting polyester pants.
- Joe Scarborough
I wanted to make pictures where you would not know who took them. I also bring the present into the past.
- Julian Schnabel
Sometimes when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny.
- Diane Setterfield
I don't think anyone ever remembers what they were really like as kids. Adults think they do, but they don't. Photos and videos don't capture the real you, or bring back to life the person you used to be. You have to return to the past to do that.
- Darren Shan
Look to the past and remember no empire rises that sooner or later won't fall.
- Al Stewart
I think experience will teach you a combination of liberalism and conservatism. We have to be progressive and at the same time we have to retain values. We have to hold onto the past as we explore the future.
- Oliver Stone
Modern as the style of Pascal's writing is, his thought is deeply impregnated with the spirit of the Middle Ages. He belonged, almost equally, to the future and to the past.
- Lytton Strachey
One of the reasons for going back into the past is that it's almost the only place that there's any drama.
- Robert Towne
It was not possible to film in California, because all the areas are heavily built up now. Coming to Cape Town is an invitation to step into the past and recreate Los Angeles of the 1930s.
- Robert Towne
A maverick feels like he has no choice however difficult his choice of expression. In my case, it was going backwards into tonality. It seemed so wrong. The idea that progress is going into the past in a new way is very strange, even though there are precedents.
- David Del Tredici
I was always attracted to the past as a kid.
- Stanley Tucci
You mostly." Her hands went still again as her eyes stared off into the past with a look so wistful it made me ache for her. "The boys tended to take care of each other but you were too much for anyone else to handle."
I poked at the ball of yarn avoiding her eyes. "I wasn't that bad."
She smiled. "You broke Ethan's arm."
"It was self-defense. He wouldn't let go of my foot."
"He was helping you tie your shoe.
- Rachel Vincent
I see myself as a true modernist. Even when I do a traditional gown, I give it a modern twist. I go to the past for research. I need to know what came before so I can break the rules.
- Vera Wang
Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.
- Alan Watts
The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
- Alan Watts
Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.
- Jessamyn West
Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility.... Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.
- Terry Tempest Williams
The castle? The monster? The man of learning? I only just thought of it. Surely you know that just as the momentous events of the past cast their shadows down the ages, so now, when the sun is drawing toward the dark,our own shadows race into the past to trouble mankind's dreams.
- Gene Wolfe
So with truth - there is a certain moment when one can say, this is the truth and here I put a dot, a stop, and I go to another thing. A judge has to put an end to a deliberation. But for a historian, there's never an end to the past. It can go on and on and on.
- A B Yehoshua
Comments
Post a Comment