c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
No matter how many losing seasons you might have had in the past with your marriage, the good thing is that all teams get a fresh start once September begins
— Shon Hyneman Love And Football How to play on the same team with your spouse
But kind of like when you move something on a wall after it’s been there for a long time, and its place is bright but everything around it is faded—that’s how I feel about her. She wasn’t there very long, but when she left, everything around her memory sort of dimmed.
— Laura     Miller, By Way of Accident
Are we slaves of our pasts? or can we rise above it?
— Hiba Fatima Ahmad
A part of me will probably always be waitin’ for her. And even when I get to the end of this life and she’s not there, I think I’ll still just wait. It’s the cruel reality of love, I think—that once you find it, it’s yours to carry. And even if you lose it and never find it back again, I think you still just keep on carrying it...and waitin’—long after the curtain closes.
— Laura     Miller, By Way of Accident
The truth is, Everyone was taken before, What hurts is that, sometimes they are imprisoned with their past.
— Bradley B. Dalina
We’re all livin’ in the past...we’re really always eighty milliseconds behind life happenin’. ...that’s how long it takes our brains to comprehend what’s already taken place right in front of our eyes. So, I guess I’m not alone. Everyone’s livin’ in the past, to some extent. I’ve just become a prisoner of mine. ... I’ve become a prisoner—willingly. But then I guess you really can’t be called a prisoner if you willingly carry the chains.
— Laura     Miller, By Way of Accident
He who does not know his past cannot make the best of his present and future, for it is from the past that we learn.
— Sheikh Zayed Al Nahyan
One minute you are here and the next moment you are some place else, some time a long ago. That is the thing about your mind. Memories. Everything still exists in the folds of your brain; you may try to forget or honestly believe that you have forgotten but nothing is ever erased. Every memory is registered, good or bad does not matter. Sometimes you bring some out on purpose, sometimes some memory jumps at you on its own, shocking you, shaking you, making you realize how far you have come and at the same time proving to you that you can never really go far enough.
— Arti Honrao
There are things that you might forget, but you might not clearly forget. Time is the only coin you have to buy the things you want to remember, and to pay for the things you want to leave behind.
— Aileene Mhar Jabarani
It is possible to construct a history which is logically consistent. It cannot be said to be true; simply that it can be sustained without contradiction. Under a given set of experimental conditions, a finite number of possible histories can be recreated using Griffiths’s method; these are called Griffiths’s Consistent Histories. In these, the world behaves as though composed of separate objects, each having fixed, intrinsic properties. However, the number of consistent histories that can be created from a single set of data is generally greater than one. As a being you are self-aware, and this consciousness allows you to hypothesize that the story you’ve created from a given set of memories is a consistent history, justified by a single narrative voice. As a unique individual, having existed for a particular period and been subjected to an ontology of objects and properties, you can assert this with absolute certainty, and so automatically assume that it is a Griffiths’s history. You make this hypothesis about real life, rather than about the domain of dreams.
— Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles
It’s good to live in the past. It’s sexier here
— Tiffany Reisz, The Saint
People didn’t know everything then. There were things people had never seen before. Places nobody had ever been. You could make up a story and people would believe it...also maybe it seems like it would be okay not to be perfect. Nobody was perfect back then. Just about everyone was defective, and most people had no choice except to stay that way.
— Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home
I am the collector of the past.
— Ashley Newell, Freakhouse
This happened back east of course. I've heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I never think of the term as a marker of geography. It's a reference to time, a statement about time, about all the densities of being and experience, it's time disguised, it's light-up time, shifting smoky time tricked out as some locus of stable arrangement. When people use that term they're talking about the way things used to be before they moved out here, the way the world used to be, not just New Jersey or South Philly, or before their parents moved, or grandparents, and about the way things still exist in some private relativity theory, some smoky shifting mind dimension, or before the other men and women came this way, the ones in Conestoga wagons, a term we learned in grade school, a back-east term, stemming from the place where the wagons were made. (pg.333)
— Don DeLillo, Underworld
Why ruin the present by talking about the past?
— Victor Robert Lee, Performance Anomalies
The past is only the present become invisible and mute
—  its memoried glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious.
The past is the past. It’s the present we should worry about.
— Paul Russell, The Coming Storm
For as soon as we have used an opportunity and have actualized a potential meaning, we have done so once and for all. We have rescued it into the past/.../, wherein nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Only the writers can change or fix the past by going back to edit old works
— Munia Khan
It surprised me that I was already using the past tense. People I knew. As if I didn't know them anymore.
— Ashley Newell, Freakhouse
Past glories are poor feeding.
— Isaac Asimov, Foundation
The bottom line is this; when one person stops being a part of your life, another one will come, and fill that empty space. Leave the ones who left in the past, right where they belong, and never look back.
— Ena Snow
There’s a ghost of a dream that you don’t even try to shake free off because you’re too in love with the way she haunts you.
— Kamila Shamsie, Kartography
When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation.
— Marcel Proust, The Captive & The Fugitive
Have only this consolation--that he was never a fiend or even truly a madman, but only an eager, studious, and curious boy whose love of mystery and of the past was his undoing. He stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to know, and reached back through the years as no one ever should reach; and something came out of those years to engulf him.
— H.P. Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
I don't think anyone's past is ever truly gone. You carry every experience, good and bad, within you.
— Michele Vail, Unchosen
Such is the amazing power of stories to link us to our past and lead us all the way back to the present.
— Margi Preus
The past is something that can not be fixed, but sets an example to fix the present to better the future.
— John Yang aka Private83
The past, rich with it's pains and joys, shuffles before me, relieving the weary dullness of endless days. I rejoice; I agonize.
— Rukhsana Ahmad, The Gatekeeper's Wife
The past is not complete until you are finished with it.
— Donnie Harold Harris
The past marks on your slate only live on in your memory, if you allow them to remain. They can't affect your future if they're no longer there.
— Melody Jackson, The Dragon Within
There is a lot I could have anticipated but I live in present & there is no anticipation to it, I wish I had a time machine
— Pushpa Rana, Just the Way I Feel
You remain so silent,as carried away,through mist of your thoughts,so dark and so deep,and even awake same as when asleep,waiting for enlightenment of a newborn day.I'm bound to your silence,to the core i'm bound,to delicate stillness,so cruel and so tender,that despite of danger,soul yearns to surrender,to that mesmerizing absence of the sound.I resign everything i once knew so clear,throwing in the wind fragments of my past,they are worth so little,they're nothing but dust,nothing to remember,and nothing to fear...
— Aleksandra Ninkovic
. . .though the names of lovers are forgotten in time, their nameswritten across the sky as ogham threads are tracedbetween the stars
— John Daniel Thieme, paulinskill hours and other poems
Clear out all of those doubts and fears. Let the past be the past. It's time.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
There's an old saying about those who cannot remember the past being condemned to repeat it. But those of us who refuse to forget the past are condemned to relive it.
— Emily Thorne
The past is a tricky thing. Sometimes it's etched in stone. And other times, it's rendered in soft memories. But if you meddle too long in deep, dark things... Who knows what monsters you'll awaken?
— Emily Thorne
Atonement was powerful
—  it was the lock on the door you closed against the past.
For the innocent, the past may hold a reward, but for the treacherous it's only a matter of time before the past delivers what they truly deserve.
— Emily Thorne
There was something so heavy about the burden of history, of the past.
— Sarah Dessen, Just Listen
Just because you're done with the past doesn't mean the past is done with you.
— Paul Doiron, The Bone Orchard
All things fade into the storied past, and in a little while are shrouded in oblivion.
— Marcus Aurelius
Every thing has changed but my mind never.
— pavankumar nagaraj
There is nothing for you to go back and live over, or fix, or feel regret about now. every part of your life has unfolded just right. And so -now- knowing all that you know from where you now stand, now what do you want? The answers are now coming forth to you. Go forth in joy, and get on with it.
— Abraham Hicks
The fact that you made worse decisions in the past shouldn't be an excuse to make bad decisions in the present.
— Sanhita Baruah
Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere.
— J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
There are all types of love in this world, but never the same love twice
One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness.
— Iris Murdoch, An Unofficial Rose
You have to get clear in your present life — clear of the junk from your past.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
There was a wonderful atmosphere of gentle age, a smell of flowers and beeswax, sweet yet faintly sour and musty; a smell that makes you feel very tender towards the past.
— Dodie Smith
Reliving your painful past will poison your heart and your tomorrow.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Time laughs in the distance as I cling to the belief memories of you will fade.
— Raine Cooper
The past is no good if you can't learn from it; therefore, no sense in dwelling on it.
— Arians Karlovičs
Think like you were before prevents it from being the person who was to be after that.
— Davi Oliveira
When you learn to love your past it becomes the wings that allow you to fly rather than the burden you drag along behind you.
— Victoria Reynolds
Just because someone has been in your life for many years, doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be a point at which you finally decide to let go.
— Wilfred James Dolor
Sometimes there are things in our lives that aren’t meant to stay. Sometimes the changes we don’t want are the changes we need to grow." - W.J. Dlor
— Wilfred James Dolor
There's some wounds that run too deep to be seen. They're the most dangerous.
— Moira Young, Rebel Heart
Therefore, the places in which we have experienced day dreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as day-dreams these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all the time.
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Therefore, the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as day-dreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Don’t be afraid of change. Change happens for a reason. Roll with it. It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it.
— Wilfred James Dolor
As seductive as it might have been to erase the grief and pain of the last ten years, it was also a lie. Young Alice was a fool. A sweet, innocent fool. Young Alice hadn't experienced ten years of living.
— Liane Moriarty, What Alice Forgot
I miss my old life
— Richard C. Morais, The Hundred-Foot Journey
The effect of change in surroundings is like that of lapse of time in making the past seem remote.
— Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887
If using 'was' could be deemed gramatically, or atleast emotionally correct, in the sense that it could relate to something that you actually couldn't do in the past, but want to do right now, then i wanna say, I was sorry, for everything...
— Allwyn Jose
Sometimes we think the hardest part of life is letting go, but what we fail to realize is that learning to start over makes it hard for us to let go." - W.J. Dolor
— Wilfred James Dolor
Your brain activates a magnificent system to store memories as reference points for you to learn from... not to create a past for you to be stuck in.
— Steve Maraboli
If using "was" could be deemed gramatically, or atleast emotionally correct, in the sense that it could relate to something that you actually couldn't do in the past, but want to do right now, then I wanna say, "I was sorry, for everything"..
— Allwyn Jose
MOTHER TIME: The past is always with us, dear, for better or worse. It is what it is and you can't change it. All you can do is learn how to live with it in the present.
— Hillary DePiano, New Year's Thieve
Some things belong to the past.
— Ronald Frame, Havisham
There are times in every life when the past acquires a particular resonance, when we grow sensitive to sounds and voices normally beyond the range of hearing. The past shades into present always and everywhere, but only rarely do we acknowledge the process; only rarely does some trigger force us to recognize ourselves as citizens of that frontier.
— Mark Slouka, Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations
I've never looked forward before. I've always looked back. I think about the past way too much and I think about what I should have done and everything I did wrong and I've never once looked forward in my life.
— Colleen Hoover, Losing Hope
There are things that once done can’t be undone, things that once said can’t be unsaid.
— Lisa Gardner, The Neighbor
Are we always our mistakes? Does anything we do heal them?
— Alexandra Duncan, Salvage
Reach into the past and remember the reasons you fell in love. Hold on to that, son, and cherish it. Then you must start moving forward again.
— J.L. Berg, Ready for You
If you're stuck in the past, you go forward in reverse
— Josh Stern, And That's Why I'm Single: What Good Is Having A Lucky Horseshoe Up Your Butt When The Horse Is Still Attached?
In the days when wishing was having, I got what I wished and then I wish I hadn't.
— Emma Donoghue, Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins
Once I embraced the dreams that once inspired. Now I've found that there is too much I didn't recognize as a gift. I may be too late to see, cherish, and endure. I may never change, but be forever stuck in the past without realizing until my eyes open to the sun and I have forgotten the moon.
— J.D. Stroube, Soul Awakened
For every moment that is past, the angel of death keeps taking the part that is dead and we keeping living in the present. The parasite wants us to carry the past with us and that makes it so heavy to be alive.
— Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom
If you throw even a cursory glance into the past, at the life which lies behind you, not even recalling its most vivid moments, you are struck every time by the singularity of the events in which you took part, the unique individuality of the characters whom you met. This singularity is like the dominant note of every moment of existence; in each moment of life, the life principle itself is unique. The artist therefore tries to grasp that principle and make it incarnate, new each time; and each time he hopes, though in vain, to achieve an exhaustive image of the Truth of human existence. The quality of beauty is in the truth of life.
— Andrei Tarkovsky
The aim of scientific thought, then, is to apply past experience to new circumstances; the instrument is an observed uniformity in the course of events. By the use of this instrument it gives us information transcending our experience, it enables us to infer things that we have not seen from things that we have seen; and the evidence for the truth of that information depends on our supposing that the uniformity holds good beyond our experience.
— William Kingdon Clifford, Lectures and Essays by the Late William Kingdon Clifford, F.R.S.
Let's burn our past down and make something better from its ashes.
— Kirk Diedrich, Junk Shop Heart
Mayhap it was not wise to question God's plans; mayhap he had been meant to live, to seek this justice, to serve some purpose. The past was the past. And the future...
— Shelly Thacker
I don't want that boy to fall over for just a bird that forgot that her wings are broken.
— Ade Santi
Look, you can't change your past, Ditty, but you've still got your future.
— Robyn Bavati, Dancing in the Dark
Never would I have a more memorable time than the month I spent in the mountains, though I wonder, when I say this, if it appears so only because it is our nature to make a heaven out of places to which we can never return.
— Yiyun Li, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
The only thing that makes the present palatable is the fact that the past was, at times, torture.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Doomed
It's a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to evaporate with the past, should exist only in memories glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photography forces us to see people before their future weighed down on them. Before they knew their endings.
— Kate Morton, The House at Riverton
We make our own symbols, after the event has passed and begun to spoil.
— Françoise Sagan, Dans un mois, dans un an
In this difficult era the most valuable commodity is the unfailing turn of the hours and how they retrieve for us the known harbor of yesterday.
— Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea
I am sick of the dern box! I have not only stepped out of the hateful piece of cardboard, I have burned it and scattered the ashes over my past.
— Tanya R. Simon
What sort of future is coming up from behind I don't really know. But the past, spread out ahead, dominates everything in sight.
— Robert Prisig
That's when it hit me. I had to go through a lot of bad relationships first, but I'd finally found him. My very own Prince Charming. Turns out they do exist.Touché, Cinderella. Touché.
— Cindi Madsen
When you don't have a vision or a plan for the future, your mind has no choice but to dwell in the past.
— Steve Maraboli
Dont look back , there is a darkness of your past
— Muhammad Saqib
I didn't mind what she called me, what anybody called me. But this was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much: a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were, they had all my memories.
— Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
Past is past... no it's not! People are always fond of saying that, but what's past is never past; not entirely.
— Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons
I set my face toward the sun again, and I think about my old life—the one I feel as though I’ve abandoned somehow. It hurts to think of it that way. And even though I know it wasn’t perfect, I look back now, and all I see is perfection. Every soft whisper, every spoken word, every gentle touch—it’s all perfect. Time won’t let me see it otherwise. They’re all just perfect memories—perfect, untouchable moments that came and went so softly that they almost feel as if they were always just a dream.
— Laura     Miller, For All You Have Left
That K was hesitant in love does not mean that his love was in any sense lukewarm. He was unable to move, despite the violence of his emotion. And since the impact of his new emotion was not so great as to allow him to forget himself, he was forced to look back and remind himself of what his past had meant. And in doing so he could not but continue along the path that he had so far followed.
— Sōseki Natsume, Kokoro
You cannot be who you were.
— D.J. Molles, Fractured
Ghosts will forever put in appearances, as they should. Our illusions have muscle and meaning. The past returns at midnight, in the heart of our dreams, and the rains and the willows forever remind us of the sacrifices we’ve offered and those we have yet to make.
— Tom Piccirilli, A Choir of Ill Children
Only Jesus can take care of the past. But we can help Him with the present.
— Calvin W. Allison, Growing in the Presence of God
There were so many wrongs piling up on both sides, so much of the past being dragged into the present, that living there was like carving the story of your life on to a sepulchral monument.
— Sara Sheridan, Truth Or Dare
What to do with the past? There was so much of it.
— Robert Hellenga, Philosophy Made Simple
Sarah’. She had thought they had thrown that bit of history into the trash, and the trash into the incinerator. But apparently ‘Sarah’ had only been thrown into a plastic bag and left in the closet under the bathroom sink, where the packet gathered mold and fungus and slowly acquired a signature stink. That stench was now slowly escaping from between the gap of the doors and the bathroom floor. Sarah was Siddharth’s ex.
— Shweta Ganesh Kumar, A Newlywed’s Adventures in Married Land
The are things that you might forget, but you might not clearly forget. Time is the only coin you have to buy the things you want to remember, and to pay for the things you want to leave behind.
— Aileene Mhar Jabarani
Your past is just a story. And once you realise this, it has no power over you.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct, Several European countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the criminal and the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.
— Nikola Tesla
The day we forget the horror, Sam, we will repeat it. Never forget your past. It will make you less human, less than human.
— Katherine Reay, Dear Mr. Knightley
Every time the song looped, all I heard was the part about the lies - and how they weigh you down. Tonight, as I drive toward Detroit in my Jeep, I know what those words really mean. It's not just the lies they're referring to. It's life. You can't run to another town, another place, another state. Whatever it is you're running from - it goes with you. It stays with you until you find out how to confront it.
— Colleen Hoover, Slammed
I think houses live their own lives along a time-stream that's different from the ones upon which their owners float, one that's slower. In a house, especially an old one, the past is closer.
— Stephen King, Bag of Bones
Remembering something from the past? you are creating it right now as evidence for who you are now.
— Frederick Dodson, Parallel Universes of Self
knowing deep inside some ghosts are too cruel to question
— Laura Wiess, Such a Pretty Girl
Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.
— Sara Sheridan
The simultaneity of near and far confused me; I thought it possible to find the past, the present and the future united in one place, giving it all that life can hold; but I had grave doubts that at any given moment life might reign both here and there, on this side and that side of the seas and mountains. And such doubts, demanding resolution, may have inspired earliest journeys: I went forth, not to learn what fear was but to test what the names held and feel their magic in the flesh, just as, at the open window, you feel the miraculous power of the sun you'd long seen reflected on distant hills and spread on dewy meadows.
— Annemarie Schwarzenbach, All the Roads Are Open: The Afghan Journey
Palaeontology is the Aladdin's lamp of the most deserted and lifeless regions of the earth
—  it touches the rocks and there spring forth in orderly succession the monarchs of the past and the ancient river streams and savannahs wherein they flourished. The rocks usually hide their story in the most difficult and inaccessible places.
My fascination with history is as much about the present as it is about the past.
— Sara Sheridan
The question shouldn't be, 'Are we guilty about our Colonial past?' it should be, 'Why aren't we more guilty about our corporate present?
— Sara Sheridan
You can't change the things you've done. It's now and the here on out you've got control of.
— Mindy McGinnis, Not a Drop to Drink
The trouble with drowning in the mess of your own life is that you're not in any shape to save anyone else. You can't be a lighthouse when you're underwater yourself.
— Lisa Wingate, The Prayer Box
Where you come from, what you look like, and what your past holds do not define you as an individual--you are what you make yourself to be.
— Kat Von D., Go Big or Go Home: Taking Risks in Life, Love, and Tattooing
...The most important thing, I think. You can't run from your past. You have to take it for what it is and realize that it's part of you.
— Lisa Wingate, The Prayer Box
My life's a tangle of past and present, like two separate puzzles with their pieces tumbled together. Nothing fits.
— Emily Murdoch, If You Find Me
Night is when the whispers of the past become the echoes of the present.
— Faraaz Kazi
Everyone’s past has ways of sneaking up on them. You just have to be in a place in the present that you’re strong enough to deal with when your past comes to visit.
— K.K. Hendin, Heart Breaths
we use to regret over our past... but sometimes i wonder why ???because everything we did in past was best from our side, well in case of both doing and thinking...
— Lovely Goyal, I Love the Way You Love Me
Never erase your past. It shapes who you are today and will help you to be the person you'll be tomorrow.
— Ziad K. Abdelnour
But think no more of the letter. The feelings of the person who wrote, and the person who received it, are now so widely different from what they were then, that every unpleasant circumstance attending it ought to be forgotten. You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly?
— Diane Setterfield, Bellman & Black
Why did I allow myself to be bored ever in the past and to compensate for it got high or drunk or rages or all the tricks people have because they want anything but serene understanding of just what there is, which is after all so much.
— Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans
No one can escape their past. The sins we've committed... and the sadness we've caused... No matter how far we run, our past remains, as ever-present as the moon in the sky. It looms in wait... for the day when we are forced to face it. But only in doing so can we truly make peace and move on in hope towards tomorrow.
— Phoenix Wright
It is through your experience you find out who you really are and who you are is from finding your own experience who really defines you.
— Charleston Parker, ONE Soul Many FACES - REVEALING THE HIDDEN TRUTH
The past is devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards.
— E.M. Forster, Maurice
Do you know that I love now to recall and visit at certain dates the places where Iwas once happy in my own way? I love to build up my present in harmony with the irrevocable past...
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights
I guess sometimes there are moments when people’s lives change and they don’t even know it. They can look back later, when everything's different, and say yes, that was the start of it―that’s when it all began, and I didn't even notice.
— Robert Swindells, Daz 4 Zoe
Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American
I am mindful that scientific achievement is rooted in the past, is cultivated to full stature by many contemporaries and flourishes only in favorable environment. No individual is alone responsible for a single stepping stone along the path of progress, and where the path is smooth progress is most rapid. In my own work this has been particularly true.
— Ernest O. Lawrence
How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at the end-of-the-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet.
— Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
The past is but an untraceable footfallIt appears in intervals and pushes us back in time,In those moments of grief and then suddenly vanishes.It’s often dark and ruthless.It baffles our thoughts and seizes our peace of mind.By making us recollect our failures, our buried expectationsAnd our shattered dreams It only gives way to fleeting tears, leaving us with fruitless guilt.It wrecks our present and ruins our futureAnd thus should be left where it is meant to beIt should be left behind …
— Chirag Tulsiani
It's not being in the past, but accepting who we were and being who we are.
— Roisin Turner
Past beings interact with present ones because life and death are a continuum and expiration entails no loss of vital essence.
— Michael E. Moseley, The Incas and their Ancestors: The Archaeology of Peru
To use the past to justify the present is bad enough—but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the past.
— Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace
How would your life be different if you learned to let go of things that have already let go of you? From relationships long gone, to old grudges, to regrets, to all the 'could’ve' and 'should’ve,' to the dead friendships you still hang on to... Free yourself from the burden of a past you cannot change.
— Steve Maraboli
The present is the key to the past.
— Archibald Geikie
Naturally—and why should I not admit this—I have occasionally wondered to myself how things might have turned out in the long run.... I only speculate this now because in the light of subsequent events, it could well be argued that in making my decision...I was perhaps not entirely aware of the full implications of what I was doing. Indeed, it might even be said that this small decision of mine constituted something of a key turning point; that that decision set things on an inevitable course towards what eventually happened. But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.... What would have transpired, one may ask, had one responded slightly differently...? And perhaps—occurring as it did around the same time as these events?
— Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
you don't need to go that far in the future, you just have to go 2000 years ago,
— Paulo Coelho
When our sympathy leads to friendship and our friendship leads to love
—  only few will understand that it is the end of our past.
I felt like I was living two lives. One in the present and one in the past.
— A.B. Shepherd, The Beacon
Trying to rewrite the past was a child's game, a pointless, ridiculous child's game no one ever won.
— Sabrina Jeffries, A Dangerous Love
If there is any good in life, in history, in my own past, I invoke it now. I invoke it with all the passion with which I have lived.
— Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
Yesterday I smiled, tomorrow never came and today is what I'm living.
— Jill Telford
Oh, glorious Art!" thus mused the enthusiastic painter, as he trod the street. "Thou art the image of the Creator's own. The innumerable forms that wander in nothingness start into being at thy beck. The dead live again. Thou recallest them to their old scenes, and givest their gray shadows the lustre of a better life, at once earthly and immortal. Thou snatchest back the fleeing moments of History. With thee, there is no Past; for at thy touch, all that is great becomes forever present; and illustrious men live through long ages in the visible performance of the very deeds which made them what they are.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Prophetic Pictures
I've learned it does not do well to dwell on the past. You cannot change it. you can revisit it, you can remember it, but it simply will not change!
— Kim Yannayon
Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form...The history of the present must teach us the history of the past.[Referring to studying fossil remains of the weevil, largely unchanged to the present day.]
— Jean-Henri Fabre, The Life and Love of the Insect
Not even God can change the past.
— Nadeem Aslam, The Blind Man's Garden
You can’t clean your dirty past as if you are cleaning a dirty window! All you can do is to create a clean future!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Looking backwardsHas never been my endeavorLost passions… bruised emotionsNever distressed me.
— Balroop Singh
I've learned to appreciate what I've got. I'm not going to waste an ounce of energy on sorting through the past or with worrying about the future. Life's too short for that.
— Chris Coppernoll, A Beautiful Fall
The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence
— T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
...the past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.
— Tim Winton, The Turning
What our parents tell us when we are small seldom goes ignored, no matter how foolish it may be
— Stephen King, The Green Mile
It's time to forget about the past, To wash away what happened last, Hide behind an empty face, Don't act too much, just say, 'Cause this is just a game.
— 30 Seconds to Mars
Tell yourself you’re dead, the way Matt does, so the past can’t hurt you.
— Ilsa J. Bick, Drowning Instinct
You can never go back to a specific moment. That's why it's important to live in the present and not the past. Don't let foolish memories get in the way of the makings of new ones.
— Emily Coussons
You need not fear it, but you must always bear in mind that the past is never quite as finished with you as you think you are with it.
— Kathryn Kennish, Switched at Birth: The True Story of a Mother's Journey
They urge us to study our history that we might learn from past tragedies and errors. But sometimes I think it's actually a good thing that humanity so easily forgets. The haze that eventually claims old suffering often enables us to move on.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
If history really forever repeats itself: then, it has always been then.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It’s not necessary for you to exacerbate your contrast with struggle in order to get it into a higher place. It is not necessary to suffer in order to give birth to desire. But when you have suffered and you have given birth to desire, so what? You’ve got a desire. Turn your attention to the desire. Think about where you’re going and never mind where you’ve been. Don’t spend any more time justifying any of that stuff.
— Abraham-Hicks
The past is as easy to travel into as turning the pages of a book...
— S.R. Ford, Mimgardr
It could be yesterdaywhen I was less in loveI thinkFor I didn’t see you in the mirrorbehind mewhile getting dressed.The way your hands couldn’t stay awayand our bodies always found their ways back to each otheras if they were meant to be togetherClose.But then it was today and I saw you againin the mirrorbehind me while getting dressedSo I go to sleep tonightalonewithout actually falling asleep because I’m scared of the moment I will wake upand realise it was just a dreamYou’re actually gone.Now all I can do is get through to another tomorrowhoping that I will be less in loveagainLike yesterdayBut not today.I was never really well with things at all.
— Charlotte Eriksson
It’s not a crime to wish for other worlds. You’ll get taxed for it but they can’t throw you in jail for creating your own private world…yet. Dramatics are fun, an indulgence. ‘You can’t go backward,’ ‘You can’t live in the past,’ they tell you. Why not? ‘You’ve got to put all that behind you and move on to other things,’ they say. Bullshit! These are all expressions of modern disposability. It’s a mediocritizing technique—trying to get rid of what I call ‘past orthodoxies.’ It’s our past that makes us unique, therefore it’s our past that economic interests want to rob from us, so they can sell us a new, improved future. Society now depends on a disposable world—out with the old, in with the new, including relationships. But how we weep and wish we could hold onto those cherished moments forever, to those long-whispered dreams, those tortured nights—how we want to grasp them and stop them from sifting through our fingers. I say, ‘Don’t let it happen. Keep things the way you want them and let the rest of the world be duped.
— Anton Szandor LaVey, The Secret Life of a Satanist: The Authorized Biography of Anton LaVey
Everyone has a story; everyone hides his past as a means of self-preservation. Some just do it better, and more thoroughly, than others.
— Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller
I was seventeen all over again, falling into intrigue with the boy who was an exquisite contradiction.
— Blakney Francis, Someone I Used to Know
If an object - a star, for instance, like our own sun - is eight hundred light years away from the Earth, it would take light leaving that object eight hundred years until it reached our eyes. So when you look at that object, you are seeing it as it appeared eight hundred light years ago, not as it looks today. It might not even exist anymore. Every time you look up at the stars, you are looking into the past.
— Wendy Mass, Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life
I hoped our lives would continue this way forever, but inevitably the past came knocking. Not the good kind that was collectible but the bad kind that had arthritis.
— David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames
Living in the past, can only hold those who live there, as its prisoners.
— Ellen J. Barrier
Wilhelm’s smile reminded Harry of his father’s sad, resigned smile, the smile of a man looking backwards because that’s where the things that made him smile were.
— Jo Nesbø, The Devil's Star
Every lesson you take from your past immediately turns into a stairs to the light!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Don’t swear at your past
—  you couldn’t existed without it! It is the only path to reach today and tomorrow! Remember that past is a great teacher who thought us all we know now!
Past has a very great superiority over the future: The future may not exist
—  but the past existed!
I took a heavenly ride through our silenceI knew the moment had arrivedFor killing the past and coming back to life".
— Pink Floyd
The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.
— Seneca
Early impressions are hard to eradicate from the mind. When once wool has been dyed purple, who can restore it to its previous whiteness?
— Jerome
The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it. If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
What drew him back was something altogether more personal, to a history where, in the pain and longing of adolescence, he was still standing on the corner of Queen and Albert Streets waiting for someone that he knew would never appear. He had long understood that one of his selves, the earliest and most vulnerable, had never left this place, and this original and clearest view of things could be recovered only through what had first come to him in the glow of its ordinary light and weather...it was the light they appeared in that was the point, and that at least had not changed.
— David Malouf, Dream Stuff: Stories
I suppose that's the secret. If you're ever wishing for things to go back to the way they were, you just have to look up.
— Lauren Oliver
To know our refuse is to know ourselves. We mark our own trail from past to present with what we've used and consumed, fondled, rejected, outgrown.
— Jane Avrich, The Winter Without Milk: Stories
I decided I would not go to court to have my mother declared incompetent, I would not fight. I put the car in drive and hit the gas. I felt as if I'd jumped off a sinking ship and was in a life raft with my little girl, my face turned away from the horror, rowing, rowing, as fast and as hard as I could in the opposite direction.
— Kaylie Jones, Lies My Mother Never Told Me: A Memoir
I can’t”… “It’s not possible”… “I’m not good enough”... ~ These are lies the demons of your past use to scare away the possibilities of the present.
— Steve Maraboli
People don't exist without the past, I know. But the past isn't alive. It's you who's alive.
— SHOOWA, ジンと猫は呼ぶと来ない [Jin to Neko wa Yobu to Konai]
Tis the old wind in the old anger,But then it threshed another wood.
— A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad
Leave a person alone who had a unpleasant past if you cant make his future a pleasant, you would do worse
— Abayasinha
For most of the people there is no today and there is no tomorrow; for them, there is only the past times! Leave your past to live your today and to live your tomorrow!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The past is like a deceased person. It has to be remembered.
— Jake Gallardo
My father used to say that when he was growing up the water was clear and there were tons of fireflies everywhere... He felt sorry for the kids growing up today... But it is really beautiful... Time will just keep on passing... we'll get old... and look back on the past. I hope we can always say... how great things were.
— Fuyumi Soryo, Mars, Volume 10
Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?She had shaken her head slowly.Men and women who can't get over their past . . . That's what ghosts are.
— Stephen King, Needful Things
If we let go of the past, we will never learn from our mistakes.
— Sarah van Waterschoot
Time is different for a tree than for a man. Sun and soil and water, these are the things a weirwood understands, not days and years and centuries. For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction. The lives of trees are different. They root and grow and die in one place, and that river does not move them. The oak is the acorn, the acorn is the oak.
— George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion.
— Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
Faculty X is simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore and Lhasa and Stepney Green are all as real as the place I happen to be in at the moment. Yet my senses do not agree. They assure me that this place, here and now, is far more real than any other place or any other time. Only in certain moments of great inner intensity do I know this to be a lie. Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it — fragmentary and uncertain though it is — that distinguishes man from all other animals
— Colin Wilson, The Occult
the past is so hard to shift. It comes with us like a chaperon, standing between us and the newness of the present - the new chance.
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
What you did in the past is your business. Those were your choices—your mistakes—if you even believe they were mistakes. Stop caring what anyone thinks and live your life the way you want to live it.
— Laura Wright, Eternal Kiss
And in the past, Archie wondered, was it just that fewer people cheated? Were they more honest, and did they leave their front doors open, did they leave their kids with the neighbors, pay social calls, run up tabs with the butcher? The funny thing about getting old in a country is people always want to hear that from you. They want to hear it really was once a green and pleasant land. They need it.
— Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Tonight his father had caught up, carrying all the horrors of hell with him. His mother could no longer protect him—hide him—and now his father‟s wrath would fall on him. He ran across the fields and through the forest, his bare feet carrying him as fast as they could go, aching and bleeding into the night. He could feel his father‟s eyes on him and his stinking breath filling Raven‟s nostrils as he rushed toward the only place he had ever found safe. He sobbed, choking on his grief and his frustration—the horrible guilt of carrying all the anger from his father into their house making him sick and afraid. He ran with lungs and muscles burning from strain, throwing himself through the doors of the castle when he reached them and only then chancing to look back the way he‟d come.
— Amanda M. Lyons, Eyes Like Blue Fire
Too many things have changed. Too much time has passed. I'm different now, a man with a pocketful of unconnected but terribly vivid memories. I was looking to dredge up what I'd long forgotten. Most of all, I am wishing for something to fasten all these gems, maybe something to hold them in a continuity that I can comprehend.
— Andrew X. Pham, Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam
Every individual lives their life with some bitter past....!!So do I...
— Gargi Pattanayak
Why are we learning about the past, when this is History?
— Galinda Glinda
By picking him up again, i guess you're just lost, baby. Lost.
— Ariel Seraphino
The past is what you take with you.
— Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum
History is indeed more than the register of crime,folilies and misfortune of mankind.
— Peter Adejimi
Don’t allow past experiences to be forgotten.Hold them close.
— John-Talmage Mathis, For the (Soon) Unemployed: You Against Them