PAST QUOTES VI
quotations about the past
You are young ... the past is nothing to you, not even another country as it is to the old, or a nightmare as it is to the guilty.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Bones
I passionately scrutinize this past, in order to reconstruct from its scattered bits the illusion of a future.
OCTAVE MIRBEAU
The Diary of a Chambermaid
What's past is prologue.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The Tempest
Learn from the past--don't wear it like a yoke around your neck.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for the dying.
JOHN BERGER
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action. What its great thinkers have thought and written on the deepest problems of life, shall we not hear and enjoy?
FELIX ADLER
Founding address of New York Society for Ethical Culture, May 15, 1876
It is a sentimental error ... to believe that the past is dead.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
The past is understood as some kind of utopian ideal, once tangible as the present, then forever out of reach with the effect of passing years.
LAETITIA WILSON
"Questions at the heart of identity", The West Australian, April 1, 2016
There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.
EUGENE O'NEILL
A Moon for the Misbegotten
The past is a closed door.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
The past could be jettisoned ... but seeds got carried.
JOAN DIDION
Where I Was From
It is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.
WILLIAM H. GASS
The Tunnel
Men attach more or less importance to past and future events according as they are more or less engaged in action and the busy scenes of life. Those who have a fortune to make, or are in pursuit of rank and power, think little of the past, for it does not contribute greatly to their views: those who have nothing to do but to think, take nearly the same interest in the past as in the future. The contemplation of the one is as delightful and real as that of the other. The season of hope has an end; but the remembrance of it is left.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
"On the Past and Future", Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners
History-writing is a way of getting rid of the past.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
A man who denies his past is a man who truly denies himself a future, for he refuses to know himself.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
I think we all agree, the past is over.
GEORGE W. BUSH
Dallas Morning News, May 10, 2000
Sometimes we need a map of the past. It helps us to understand the present, and to plan the future.
JOSEPHINE HART
Damage
The past is always a rebuke to the present.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
"Fugitive's Reunion"
It's harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future.
WILLIAM GIBSON
The Paris Review, summer 2011
When it comes to the past, EVERYONE writes fiction.
STEPHEN KING
Joyland