PAST QUOTES II
quotations about the past
If the past is not to bind us ... we should have no law but the inclination of the moment.
GEORGE ELIOT
The Mill on the Floss
Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging up your back and running its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do--the only thing--is run.
LAUREN OLIVER
Delirium
That which is past is gone and irrevocable, and wise men have enough to do with things present and to come.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
From the experience of the past we derive instructive lessons for the future.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
Inaugural Address, March 4, 1825
The great times were never as great as they seem in the rearview mirror.
PAT BENATAR
Between a Heart and a Rock Place: A Memoir
Time wasn't a thing you could divide easily; there was no defined middle or beginning or end. I could pretend to leave the past behind, but it would not leave me.
SARAH DESSEN
Just Listen
The past is always judged by the present.
NEITH BOYCE
Enemies
The past is funny ... it never seems to let things lie, finished. It never seems to stay in place as it should.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
All is now secure and fast;
Not the gods can shake the Past;
Flies-to the adamantine door
Bolted down forevermore.
None can reënter there,--
No thief so politic,
No Satan with a royal trick
Steal in by window, chink, or hole,
To bind or unbind, add what lacked,
Insert a leaf, or forge a name,
New-face or finish what is packed,
Alter or mend eternal Fact.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Past
And that past is ever present,
Ever present in my heart,
Filling it with sweetest love-thoughts,
As I tread the world's wide mart.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
Thoughts
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Lost Souls
The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me ... all that's left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears - I shall not find myself.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
Old Age
There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Zombie
You can never plan the future by the past.
EDMUND BURKE
letter to a Member of the National Assembly in answer to some objections to his book on French affairs, 1791
All the strange, checkered past seems to crowd upon my mind.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
speech, February 11, 1861
But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
All tradition is merely the past.
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
Krishnamurti to Himself
I don't believe in yesterday, by the way.
JOHN LENNON
interview, Playboy, January 1981
The reverberation often exceeds through silence the sound that sets it off; the reaction occasionally outdoes by way of repose the event that stimulated it; and the past not uncommonly takes a while to happen, and some long time to figure out.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
Our yesterdays
Are like a lonely and a ruined land
Wherein a breeze of recollection sighs--
A fading land to which is no return.
HENRY ABBEY
"Invocation to the Sun"