PAST QUOTES II

quotations about the past

Past quote

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

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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

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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

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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

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From the experience of the past we derive instructive lessons for the future.

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

Inaugural Address, March 4, 1825

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I don't believe in yesterday, by the way.

JOHN LENNON

interview, Playboy, January 1981

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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

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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

Tags: Ralph Waldo Emerson


The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

CASSANDRA CLARE

City of Lost Souls

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The past is always judged by the present.

NEITH BOYCE

Enemies

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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

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All the strange, checkered past seems to crowd upon my mind.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

speech, February 11, 1861

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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All tradition is merely the past.

JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI

Krishnamurti to Himself

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Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.

DOUG LARSON

attributed, Quotable Quotes

Tags: Doug Larson