c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. 
— Janet Fitch, White Oleander
My past is trying to catch up to me and I must continue run from it. It's the only way I can live.
— Nicole Sobon, Program 13
There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken.
— Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling
You can't change where you came from, but you can change where you go from here.
— Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake
It's best to be ruthless with the past.
— Stephen King, Rose Madder
If my twelve-year-old self, of whom I had grown rather fond, thinking about him, were to reproach me: 'Why have you grown up such a dull dog, when I gave you such a good start? Why have you spent your time in dusty libraries, catologuing other people's books instead of writing your own? What had become of the Ram, the Bull and the Lion, the example I gave you to emulate? Where above all is the Virgin, with her shining face and curling tresses, whom I entrusted to you'- what should I say?I should have an answer ready. 'Well, it was you who let me down, and I will tell you how. You flew too near to the sun, and you were scorched. This cindery creature is what you made me.'To which he might reply: 'But you have had half a century to get over it! Half a century, half the twentieth century, that glorious epoch, that golden age that I bequeathed to you!''Has the twentieth century,' I should ask, 'done so much better than I have? When you leave this room, which I admit is dull and cheerless, and take the last bus to your home in the past, if you haven't missed it - ask yourself whether you found everything so radiant as you imagined it. Ask yourself whether it has fulfilled your hopes. You were vanquished, Colston, you were vanquished, and so was your century, your precious century that you hoped so much of.
— L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between
He held her close enough to kiss, close enough to whisper the most important secrets in the world, and he spoke to her as he would have wanted some good angel to speak to his family, to his own shivering young soul, long ago and in a land far away.
— Cassandra Clare, Saving Raphael Santiago
What's done, is done
— William Shakespeare, Macbeth
If I look at my old lyrics, they seem to be full of rage, but empty. There was an emptiness in my life.
— Green Day
I often laughed, and you often gave me a dissatisfied look, till you pressed me to unfold my past before you as if it were a roll of pictures. It was then I felt respect for you. Because you unreservedly showed me your resolution to catch something alive in my being, and to sip the warm blood running in my body, by cutting my heart. At that time, I was still living, and did not want to die. So I rejected your request, promising to satisfy you some day. Now I am going to destroy my heart myself, and pour my blood into your veins. I shall be happy if a new life can enter into your bosom, when my heart has stopped beating.
— Sōseki Natsume, Kokoro
What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
— William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow
Shall we never never get rid of this Past? ... It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables
It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing "How High the Moon" on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could ever improvise the dialogue.) The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished. It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.
— Oscar Wilde
Emptying the ashtrays was very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labeled ‘the past,’ and having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue.
— Zelda Fitzgerald
It’s not easy remembering the good times.
— Cecelia Ahern, How to Fall in Love
It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas.
— Christopher Fowler, Ten Second Staircase
Into my heart an air that killsFrom yon far country blows:What are those blue remembered hills,What spires, what farms are those?That is the land of lost content,I see it shining plain,The happy highways where I wentAnd cannot come 
— A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad
Sometimes, I think one should only live in the present. The past is only a heavy burden to carry with you. And yet… it’s so hard to let them go… to forget… to move ahead…
— Danielle Steel, Zoya
Tell me your past, my beloved, for a man is his past, and is to be known by it.
— James Stephens, Irish Fairy Tales
You shouldn’t never regret something that made you smile
— Bei Maejor
In the past, I always used to be looking for answers. Today, I know there are only questions. So I just live.
— Sarah Brightman
Remembrance of the past kills all present energy and deadens all hope for the future
— Maxim Gorky, Twenty-Six Men and a Girl and Other Stories
You know that old phrase ‘Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it’? Well, I think those who remember the past are even worse off.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Strange, what brings these past things so vividly back to us, sometimes!
— Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
Her soft trailing fingers would continue to attempt a connection that I refused to allow
—  that I couldn’t allow if I wanted to survive.
In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points', one can surely only recognise such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.
— Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
If you don’t deal with the past, the past deals with you.
— Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson, Gone
All I trust is the past. Things that have ended can't betray me.
— Novala Takemoto, Missin' (Novel)
A ghost from her past, part of a world to which she no longer belonged but had never stopped missing.
— Catherine Anderson, Summer Breeze
We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.
— Alfred North Whitehead
Sometimes, Miss Jarmond, it's not easy to bring back the past. There are unpleasant surprises. The truth is harder than ignorance
— Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah's Key
Sitting on the floor, I'd replay the past in my head. Funny, that's all I did, day after day after day for half a year, and I never tired of it. What I'd been through seemed so vast, with so many facets. Vast, but real, very real, which was why the experience persisted in towering before me, like a monument lit up at night. And the thing was, it was a monument to me.
— Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
There is nothing worse, is there," she said, "than a past that has never been fully dealt with. One can convince oneself, that it is all safely in the past and forgotten about, but the very fact that we can tell ourselves that it is forgotten proves that it is not.
— Mary Balogh, Simply Magic
It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.
— Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991
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, The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Volume III: 1949-1955
Everything that is past is either a learning experience to grow on, a beautiful memory to reflect on, or a motivating factor to act upon.
— Denis Waitley
I still preserve those relics of past sufferings and experience, like pillars of witness set up in travelling through the valve of life, to mark particular occurrences. The footsteps are obliterated now; the face of the country may be changed; but the pillar is still there, to remind me how all things were when it was reared.
— Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey
When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which the young applaud the most insignificant improvements … while remaining heedless of the world’s barbarism. I don’t say things have got worse; I merely say the young wouldn’t notice if they had. The old times were good because then we were young, and ignorant of how ignorant the young can be.
— Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
Experience," which is just a euphemism for heartache and heartbreak, failed love and false promises, for every time you told yourself This is the real thing and Finally I've found my way home only to end up lost in a muck or lying across rickety train tracks, praying for deliverance and not knowing if that would mean getting run over or being spared; "experience," which is a neutral word that most people know only means something good on a resume, a term that in the rest of life is more like a criminal rap sheet full of mishaps that cannot be expunged, this indelible quality made more frightening because there are no authorities keeping track, no one is forcing you to remember these things, it is all your own fault, it is only you who cannot forget; "experience," which is supposed to be the playground and peep show and life-size labyrinth of adolescence, which can, when it occurs at the right time in life...if it is delivered in moderate and judicious measure...make you a more capable lover and friend, spouse and partner.
— Elizabeth Wurtzel
Who am I? I am who I say I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest— where you want to erect a museum. Don't hoard the past, Astrid. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.
— Janet Fitch, White Oleander
Smartass Disciple: Master, I want to be the better me by forgetting my past.Master of Stupidity: If you just forget it, how would you measure you're better?
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
The past lies beneath the surface, intransigent truth. Remembered or not, what we say and do remains, always.
— Meredith Hall, Without a Map
The past is dead and buried. But I know now that buried things have a way of rising to the surface when one least expects them to.
— Dan Simmons, Prayers to Broken Stones
It was no good to look back, to apologize for what had happened, or to wonder what could have been different.
— Lily Blake, Snow White & the Huntsman
The past that Southerners are forever talking about is not a dead past--it is a chapter from the legend that our kinfolks have told us, it is a living past, living for a reason. The past is a part of the present, it is a comfort, a guide, a lesson.
— Ben Robertson, Red Hills and Cotton
She'd cried over a broken heart before. She knew what that felt like, and it didn't feel like this. Her heart felt not so much broken as just ... empty. It felt like she was an outline empty in the middle. The outline cried senselessly for the absent middle. The past cried for the present that was nothing.
— Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting
There's no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can't re-create what's over.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
But you must stop playing among his ghosts -- it's stupid and dangerous and completely pointless. He's trying to lay them to rest here, not stir them up, and you seem eager to drag out all the sad old bones of his history and make them dance again. It's not nice, and it's not fair.
— Patricia A. McKillip, Winter Rose
I'm a century old, an impossible age, and my brain has no anchor in the present. Instead it drifts, nearly always to the same shore. Today, as most days, it is 1962. The year I discovered love.
— Meg Rosoff, What I Was
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.
— Joan Didion, Where I Was From
When I moved, I unearthed the diaries I kept for ten years. I sat and went through them and they were a worthless burden to own. People will say it's tragic I threw them out, but I know it isn't.
— Bill Callahan, Letters to Emma Bowlcut
And it is clear to Evan, now: the difference between what is and what has been done; the present and the past. He sees that what he does and who he is isn't based on the past unless he wants it to be... No. That is the past, which has been seen differently through many different eyes and has become hazy and unclear, like a pond when stirred with a stick. Only the present moment is clear and free from prejudice.
— Garth Stein, How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets
(M)uch as we might imagine we can leave the past behind, it has a nasty way of pressing its hoary old face against the window just as we were sitting down to the feast.
— Valerie Martin, The Confessions of Edward Day
What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you're so wrecked it's hard to believe you ever were a child?
— Mitch Albom, For One More Day
Not watching the path where his legs took him, he walked on because he knew he had to walk ahead, leaving his past behind.
— Faraaz Kazi
I don't know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination.
— Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
It is unthinkable in the twentieth century to fail to distinguish between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be prosecuted and what constitutes that "past" which "ought not to be stirred up.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
To live meant feeding my former self to my current self.
— Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet
If you have ever felt hopeless hang on The night you’re enduring may seem long but there is joy coming in the morning. Incredible changes are going to take place in your life as you begin to relinquish your past and renew your present.
— Sue Augustine, When Your Past Is Hurting Your Present: Getting Beyond  Fears That Hold You Back
So, yes, I will marry you. Someday. If you'll have me," he said modestly."Of course I will, you idiot," I said with a shriek, and threw myself into his arms.
— Eilis O'Neal, The False Princess
by now you've already formed your own impression. you believe that an act committed a lifetime ago defines a man, or you believe that a person's past has nothing to do with his future. you think i am either a hero, or a monster. maybe knowning more about circumstances will make you think differently about me, but it won't change what happened twenty-eight years ago.
— Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts
In half hour my mother has managed to give me what my father couldn't: my past.
— Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts
The present grows within the boundaries of the past.
— Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories
The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.
— Frederick Buechner, Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation
In the New Year, never forget to thank to your past years because they enabled you to reach today! Without the stairs of the past, you cannot arrive at the future!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Withdraw, like a turtle, into a hard yet harmless shell, ornamented with beautiful memories of the past.from the book 'I Know Who You Are!
— Fatima Masood
Every time I hold your hand in the night and look at that star, I remember the fact that it is millions of light years away from us, we are looking at its past and it doesn't exist anymore and I always end up feeling, what if we both are made up of the dust of the same star we are staring at.
— Akshay Vasu
The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.
— Sebastian Faulks, Engleby
Haven't you noticed, too, on the part of nearly everyone you know, a growing rebellion against the present? And an increasing longing for the past? I have. Never before in all my long life have I heard so many people wish that they lived 'at the turn of the century,' or 'when life was simpler,' or 'worth living,' or 'when you could bring children into the world and count on the future,' or simply 'in the good old days.' People didn't talk that way when I was young! The present was a glorious time! But they talk that way now. For the first time in man's history, man is desperate to escape the present. Our newsstands are jammed with escape literature, the very name of which is significant. Entire magazines are devoted to fantastic stories of escape - to other times, past and future, to other worlds and planets - escape to anywhere but here and now. Even our larger magazines, book publishers and Hollywood are beginning to meet the rising demand for this kind of escape. Yes, there is a craving in the world like a thirst, a terrible mass pressure that you can almost feel, of millions of minds struggling against the barriers of time. I am utterly convinced that this terrible mass pressure of millions of minds is already, slightly but definitely, affecting time itself. In the moments when this happens - when the almost universal longing to escape is greatest - my incidents occur. Man is disturbing the clock of time, and I am afraid it will break. When it does, I leave to your imagination the last few hours of madness that will be left to us; all the countless moments that now make up our lives suddenly ripped apart and chaotically tangled in time.Well, I have lived most of my life; I can be robbed of only a few more years. But it seems too bad - this universal craving to escape what could be a rich, productive, happy world. We live on a planet well able to provide a decent life for every soul on it, which is all ninety-nine of a hundred human beings ask. Why in the world can't we have it? ("I'm Scared")
— Jack Finney, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now
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, Love Remains
Don't judge the past by the standards of today. It won't work. They're incompatible.
— Richelle Mead
The past influences everything and dictates nothing.
— Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories
Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal—the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to routine?
— Roger Zelazny, Doorways in the Sand
Our personal past is only available to us now through black-and-white film, it's a medium for communication with the dead, including our dead selves, the way we used to be, which is why we're drawn to it.
— Frank Lentricchia, The Sadness of Antonioni
I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield)“But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.
— John Irving, The Cider House Rules
But this was what happened when you didn't want to visit and confront the past: the past starts visiting and confronting you.
— Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park
While they talked they remembered the years of their youth, and each thought of the other as he had been at another time.
— John  Williams, Stoner
Delving into the past had unveiled a cruel lesson - that in the book of life it is perhaps best not to turn back pages; it was a path on which, whatever direction we took, we'd never be able to choose our own destiny.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Midnight Palace
The past was filling the room like a tide of whispers.
— Ross Macdonald, The Instant Enemy
The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past.
— Will Durant
The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.
— Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost
The past is fractal premonition, infinite to the eye but nothing to be built on . . .
— Lawrence Krauser, Lemon
It may be possible to forget our past but our past is not going to forget us.
— Francesca Marciano, Casa Rossa
Most of us assume that human beings have free will. However, . . . [we] are very much conditioned by our species, culture, family, and by the past in general. . . . It is rare for a human being to have free will. . . . (140)
— Ravi Ravindra, The Wisdom of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras: A New Translation and Guide by Ravi Ravindra
There is a way to look at the past. Don't hide from it. It will not catch you if you don't repeat it.
— Pearl Bailey
The distance to the corner shops of childhood becomes unfathomable, immeasurable; the candy bars have changed. And change has changed.
— Ilse Aichinger
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
Dead voices, lost sounds, forgotten noises, vibrations lockstepping into the abyss and now too distant ever to be recaptured!...What sort of arrows would be able to transfix such birds?
— Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve
To forget the past so easily seems scarcely loyal to oneself. I am so selfishly absorbed in my present self that I have grown not to care a damn about that ever increasing collection of past selves- those dear, dead gentlemen who one after the other have tenanted the temple of this flesh and handed on the torch of my life and personal identity before creeping away silently and modestly to rest.
— W.N.P. Barbellion, The Journal of a Disappointed Man
More than half of my life is past
—  I have left only the time I need for turning the rest of it to account and for effacing my errors by my virtues.
The past is no further away than the last breath you took.
— Robin Hobb, Fool's Errand
The past is truly an inoperable tumour that spreads to the present.
— Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole
He says to me, Ranulph, he says... that the past will never come again, but that we must remember that the past is made of the present, and that the present is always here.
— Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist
When the Lord disconnects you from your past, don't try to hook up with it again.
— Anita R. Sneed-Carter
If I shut everything else out and filled the room with memories, the past could become the present, and I could live there, with him. I would never leave.
— Na, I'll Be Seeing You
You cannot see the past that did not happen any more than you can foresee the future.
— Madeleine L'Engle, The Arm of the Starfish
Only the past is real.
— Frank Lentricchia, The Sadness of Antonioni
By living exclusively for the present, we let ourselves be hemmed in by an ocean of death. Conversely, by reviving the past, we enlarge our living space.
— Amin Maalouf, Orígenes
To positively discriminate in favour of groups that have been negatively discriminated against in the past.
— Ben Elton, Blast from the Past
..the past kept pricking at me and I knew that all the elements of those nineteen days in July were astir within me, like phlegm in an attack of bronchitis, waiting to come up. I had kep them buried all these years, but they were there, I knew, the more complete, the more unforgotten, for being carefully embalmed. Never, never had they seen the light of day; the slightest stirring had been stifled with a scattering of earth.My secret- the explanation of me- lay there. I take myself much too seriously, of course. What does it matter to anyone what I was like, then or now? But every man is important to himself at one time or another; my problem had been to reduce the importance, and spread it out as thinly as I could over half a century. Thanks to my interment policy I had come to terms with life, I had made a working -working was the word - arrangement with it, on the one condition that there should be no exhumation. Was it true, what I sometimes told myself, that my best energies had been given to the undertaker's art? If it was, what did it matter? Should have I acquitted myself better, with the knowledge I had now? I doubted it; knowledge may be power, but it is not resilience, or resourcefulness, or adaptability to life, still less is it instinctive sympathy with human nature; and those where qualities I possessed in 1900 in far greater measure that I possess them in 1952.Prologue, page 16
— L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between
[The past] has a way of hanging around, demanding we understand it and weave it into ourselves so that we can go on.
— Margaret Coel, The Eagle Catcher
(A) trip to the attic is an excursion into history, and...all over the world the present unravels beneath the stored detritus of the past; that's what attics are for.
— Valerie Martin, The Confessions of Edward Day
Had I known how sweet they wereI would have saved more of these memories
— Richard L.  Ratliff
When you put a log on the fire, the light and heat you see is, in a literal sense, the decades of sunshine that tree basked in over its lifetime.
— Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions
In books too, as well as in music, she courted the misery which a contrast between the past and present was certain of giving.
— Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
Always make sure that the PAST is a Previous Action Successfully Terminated and not a Permanent Application of Stressful Trials.
— Charbel Tadros
I am a typical example of Western Jew. This means I don't have a moment of peace, that nothing has come easily to me, not just the present and the future, but even the past, that thing that each man receives as his birth-right: even that I have to conquer, and perhaps that is the hardest task.
— Franz Kafka
Do you know who your grand grand grand grand grand father is? Probably you don’t! If you want to know your very distant past, just look at yourself because you are the accumulated past, you are the ancient river coming from the valleys of the far past!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
I realize that I don’t know where to start. Not because I’m unsure of my story, but because I’m not sure why I feel compelled to tell it in the first place. What can be achieved by unearthing the past?
— Nicholas Sparks, A Bend in the Road
While he spends all of his time trying to remember, I spend all of my time trying to forget.I don’t want to remember how it feels to love him.I want to forget everything in this world that reminds me of him.
— Colleen Hoover, Never Never: Part Three
Because in this way all I did was to accumulate past after past behind me, multiplying the pasts, and if one life was too dense and ramified and embroiled for me to bear it always with me, imagine so many lives, each with its own past and the pasts of the other lives that continue to become entangled one with the others.
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Our pasts haunt us all.” I admitted, in a rare moment of perfect clarity.
— Ross  Turner, Jenson
You gotta look backwards to go forwards.
— Fennel Hudson, Traditional Angling - Fennel's Journal - No. 6
Maybe the problem with holding onto memories so tightly is that they don’t allow us to make room for the future. Maybe the gentle decay of the past is a blessing that dulls the sharp blade of regret, allowing the possibility of rebirth.
— Ryan Galloway, Biome
I think in some ways it's like that for all of us, living with the ghosts of things that used to be, or never were. We're all of us haunted by yesterday, and we got no choice but to keep marching into our tomorrows.Keep marching, boys and girls. Keep marching.
— Rodman Philbrick, The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg
The past is gone. It went by like dusk to dawn.
— Steven Tyler
The past informs the present.
— Fennel Hudson, Traditional Angling - Fennel's Journal - No. 6
I find myself becoming increasingly nostalgic for the past, but after all I suppose that is the only thing one can be nostalgic about.
— James Rozoff
Never back, never back!... People don’t like going back, even if they must. I don’t like going back! And I’m not people! But I look back, sometimes, every so often, just to make sure I’m not leaving anything important behind. Like my tail! I can never be sure when I leave my tail behind me by mistake.
— Emory R. Frie, Wonderland
Preserve the spirit of a ‘lost’ age, when time moved slower.
— Fennel Hudson, Traditional Angling - Fennel's Journal - No. 6
Your past and your pain will certainly impact you,but they don’t have to define you. You get to write your own definition.
— Scott Stabile
The problem is not that we forget the past. It is that we recall it too well. Children recall wrongs that enemies did to their grandfathers, and blame the granddaughters of the old enemies. Children are not born with memories of those who insulted their mother or slew their grandfather or stole their land. Those hates are bequeathed to them, taught them, breathed into them. If adults didn't tell their children of their hereditary hates, perhaps we would do better.
— Robin Hobb, Assassin's Fate
When you are rich, your past disappears. You get everything you want when you want it . . . Everyone wants to know you. Everyone wants to be your friend.
— Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora
It appears that time has turned that young woman, who imagined herself a romantic heroine, into something of a comic character, but I remain fond of her. We are relatives, after all.
— Siri Hustvedt, A Plea for Eros: Essays
Your past does not define you but what does is who you are now and what your AIMING to BECOME!
— Hopal Green
If you think that your partner has been cheating, then take a look at their will. If a past lover is in there, then it is probable that some form of infidelity has occurred.
— Steven Magee
You know that when your partner deletes their messages to a past lover after being accused of cheating, then it is likely that they were being unfaithful in some way.
— Steven Magee
I really admire people who don’t need to live surrounded by lots of stuff. My bedroom is piled up with clothes and books, papers and photographs. I like to collect things, anything I can grab from wherever I’m travelling. I think it’s the sign of slight anxiety to always want something around you to represent a good moment you had, to hang on to the leftovers. But then they’re a pleasure to look at too, so it’s not all negative.
— Isabelle Huppert
Once we get to know where and why the skeletons of the past are buried, we can start wading across our muddled memories into the open plains of a new horizon. ("Going back to yesterday")
— Erik Pevernagie
Going away won't change anything if you're running from yourself.
— Joyce Rachelle
Your life is like a book you decide what to write on it or erase from it
—  But you might not be able to erase completely your past mistakes. So the choices you make today will determine how the book (your life)will look like.
Drinking the mystery punch that will always get her
— Tanya Gambhir
The ego romanticizes the past to avoid the true romance of the present.
— Alan Cohen
The past looks worse the closer you look at it.
— Hanif Kureishi, The Nothing
When the hunt for new sources of energy had at one point got particularly frantic, one bright young chap suddenly spotted that one place which had never used up all its available energy was - the past. And with the sudden rush of blood to the head that such insights tend to induce, he invented a way of mining it that very same night, and within a year huge tracts of the past were being drained of all their energy and simply wasting away. Those who claimed that the past should be left unspoilt were accused of indulgingin an extremely expensive form of sentimentality.
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
— H.G. Wells
There was no use wondering about the past.
— Connilyn Cossette, Wings of the Wind
Drugs may know how to numb a brain, but the past never forgets to resurface.
— Kris Kidd
Leave my past... come in the present (PLEASE).
— Deyth Banger
But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.
— Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good
I am born anew at each green fall of the die, and by die-ing I eliminate my since. The past - paste, pus, piss - is all only illusory events created by a stone mask to justify an illusory stagnant present.
— Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man
Where does the past go when it changes?
— Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Reputations
That is who I was yesterday. Today I walk with God.
— Shannon L. Alder
To my mind, one does not put oneself in place of the past, one only adds a new link.
— Paul Cézanne
When we can return to the roads of our past and see nothing but the beautiful view, then we've truly moved on.
— Nanette Mathews
Telling our personal story constitutes an act of consciousness that defines the ethical lining of a person’s constitution. Recounting personal stories promotes personal growth, spurs the performance of selfless deeds, and in doing so enhances the ability of the equitable eye of humanity to scroll rearward and forward. Every person must become familiar with our communal history of struggle, loss, redemption, and meaningfully contemplate the meaning behind our personal existence in order to draft a proper and prosperous future for succeeding generations. Accordingly, every person is responsible for sharing their story using the language of thought that best expresses their sanguine reminiscences. Without a record of pastimes, we will never know what were, what we now are, or what we might become by steadfastly and honorably struggling with mortal chores.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Isn't it weird that everything that's coming out of my mouth is going directly into the past?
— Rebekah Crane, The Odds of Loving Grover Cleveland
In every man’s life there are moments where looking to the past may ruin the future and in those moments walking forward without looking back is the best thing one can ever do!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
There are some things in the past that… that just aren’t meant to be viewed.
— Rebecca McNutt, Mandy and Alecto: The Collected Smog City Book Series
Those happy memories now added to my sorrows.
— Melita Tessy, Battle of the Spheres: Crust, Mantle and Core
...let the past sleep, but let it sleep in the sweet embrace of Christ, and let us go on into the invincible future with Him.
— Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest
This living light found in books and letters showing us the mind and heart of God; love written in letters also flowing with blood let's us see into the past and future alike giving hope, faith, and love on every page writing a never ending story on the hearts of men, women, and children alike who receive such truth and follow this light.
— John M Sheehan
Fallen flowers can't climb back. If the root is strong, we can expect new flowers. Don't think too much about the 'lost' past. Just love the present & live for the future. From the tree, I learn, Make your roots strong. There will never be shortage of flowers 
— Unknown
The past is never past and the present was seeming increasingly absent.--Here Tomorrow
— Kaleb Kilton
Getting stuck in the past and whining about who had hurt us hampers our personal growth and submerges us in the sea of self-compassion.
— Balroop Singh
His past followed him around as faithfully as his shadow.
— Courtney Milan, Unlocked
If you're going to make the past your present, be prepared for a lifetime of dust ...
— Lily Graham, The Cornish Escape
Every way he turned, his past was detonated, revealing tunnels and alternative routes under the packed, settled earth of the present.
— Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs
One can never ever forget the one who they loved in their past and that to their First Love!!'Whenever and whomever it was, your experience with your first love is etched into your memory forever..
— Kumar
There are times in one's life when a good book—the right book—feels like a voice speaking in the darkness,reaching out from the past;providing solace when all else seems lost.
— Justine Picardie
Not all of the moments what you encountered in your mind are reminisced, the time will remember us.
— -Kurt Reiner C. Suarez
My present crush is crushing my past crush...Can I summarize "Crush Crushing & now Crushed
— Akansh Malik
If you can be very impartial in analysing your own past, then you will have a much better future!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
I like you, Mallory. And God knows you deserve a hell of a lot better than me.” He dipped his chin, laughing as he thrust his hand through his hair. “God. I suck at this. Can we just forget—”I snapped out of it. “You like me?”His gaze flew to mine. “Yeah, I do. And I know I’ve been with Paige and I’m not going to pretend that meant nothing, but it’s not how I feel for you. Not remotely like how I feel for you. And it’s not because of our past—because of you and I knowing each other for so long,” he said, and the words kept coming out in a rush. “At first, I thought that was why—this attraction I have to you. I thought it was because of everything we’d shared. And then the night I came to your place and you fixed me up, I thought it was just this physical thing.” Pink raced across his cheeks. “And it is most definitely a physical thing, but it wasn’t just that. I think part of me knew that from the very first time you said my name.”Now my pulse was pounding. He liked-liked me. Oh my God, this was unexpected. This was totally unplanned. It was an infinite, vast sea of un
— Jennifer L. Armentrout, The Problem with Forever
It reminded him of the truth—who he really was, and the fact that no matter how far he ran, his past would be right there with him.
— Kayla Krantz, Survive at Midnight
We are victims of our history and our present. They place too many obstacles in the way of love. And we cannot enjoy even our differences in peace.
— Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy
The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float. Nigeria was like that for me: mostly forgotten, except for those few things that I remembered with an outsize intensity. These were the things that had been solidified in my mind by reiteration, that recurred in dreams and daily thoughts: certain faces, certain conversations, which, taken as a group, represented a secure version of the past that I had been constructing since 1992. But there was another, irruptive, sense of things past. The sudden reencounter in the present, of something or someone long forgotten, some part of myself I had relegated to childhood and to Africa.
— Teju Cole, Open City
A person experiments in life and reflects upon those events in order to discover how to lead a meaningful life. We conduct a quest searching for the source our essential being. What we seek is inside us waiting for us to discover. Until we realize the vital inner source that provides direction for our life, all our efforts are in vain. The ego with its craving and fearful protection strategies is what prevents us from perceiving the transparency of the world in which we belong. When we cease clinging to the past and no longer daydream of the future and unreservedly accept whatever is occurring while sacrificing ourselves in service of other people our sense of self vanishes and we exist only as conscious and nonjudgmental witnesses of reality.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Since to follow a trail is to remember how it goes, making one's way in the present is itself a recollection of the past...onward movement is itself a return.
— Tim Inglod & Jo Lee Vergunst
Recollection builds up our personality. Our individuality is based on all the little pieces we assembled in the past. ("The past was her best friend")
— Erik Pevernagie
Nostalgia is your brain's way of photoshopping the blemishes of your past
— Steve Maraboli
I rest my head on his shoulder, feeling his heart beating against me. I wish I could gather time around us, slowing the minutes, making them last a lifetime.“I was born on the island kingdom of Ghedda,” I whisper. This is a story I never told even to you, Habiba. I tell it now only because I cannot bear to leave him without the truth, knowing only half of me. I raise my head and meet his eyes. “That was more than four thousand years ago. I was the eldest daughter of a wise and generous king.”Aladdin stares at me, his eyes soft and curious, encouraging me to go on.“When I was seventeen, I became queen of Ghedda. In those days, the jinn were greater in number, and the Shaitan held greater sway over the realms of men. He demanded we offer him twenty maidens and twenty warriors in sacrifice, in return for fair seas and lucrative trade. I was young and proud and desired, above all else, to be a fair ruler. I would not bow to his wishes, so he shook our island until it began to fall into the sea.”I shudder, and Aladdin draws me closer.“I climbed to the alomb at the top of the Mountain of Tongues, and there offered myself to the Shaitan, if he would only save my city from the sea.” My voice falls to a whisper, little more than a ripple on the water. “So he took me and made me jinn and put me in the lamp. And then he caused the Mountain of Tongues to erupt, and Ghedda was lost to fire. For he had sworn only to save my people from the sea, not from flame.
— Jessica Khoury, The Forbidden Wish
Daily life took as much as she had. The future was sunset; the past something to leave behind. And if it didn't stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out.
— Toni Morrison, Beloved
A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives—of approving of some and disapproving of others.
— Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
That is what the past was, that which you could not get rid of. The past did not resemble the crumbs spilled over a rug. You could not shake them out from open windows.
— Elif Shafak, The Flea Palace
Everything would turn out exactly the same, and I would return here for a second time, and then, if I was fool enough, a third time, waiting, as now, for my other to touch the canvas. And it would be progressively worse, because though I would know slightly more each time, I would still be powerless to change my fate. Perhaps I would be unaware of the previous decision, yet choose again to come back. Or worse, I would become aware that I was inadvertently repeating the same mistake for a horrific split second just after I made the decision. Infinity was terrifying. Its abyss makes my skin crawl.
— Wesley Stace, Misfortune
Wisely the Hebrews admit no Present tense in their language;While we are speaking the word, it is is already the Past.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Whether pleasant or dismal, the past is always a safe territory, if only because it is already experienced, and the species' capacity to revert, to run backward -especially in its thoughts or dreams, since there we are safe as well - is extremely strong in all of us, quite irrespective of the reality we are facing. Yet this machinery has been built into us, not for cherishing or grasping the past (in the end, we don't do either), but more for delaying the arrival of the present - for, in other words, slowing down a bit the passage of time.
— Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason: Essays
...I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved - and who now walk the long stormy summer. It is a generation staunch by inheritance, sophisticated by fact - and rather deeply wise. More than that, what I feel about them is summed up in a line of Willa Cather's: "We possess together the precious, the incommunicable past.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Short Autobiography
The past never leaves you. You carry it around with you for as long as you live, like a pale, stubborn worm lodged there in your gut, keeping you up at night.
— George Bishop, The Night of the Comet
The past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you can see it as décor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.
— Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
Whatever happened to you yesterday no longer matters. Be present. Today is going to be a great day.
— Karen A. Baquiran
We both know... that soon everything is going to end......This chat will be in the past... but what to do on that riddle or puzzle or mystery...????
— Deyth Banger
The next 15 years are more important than the previous 15. The past is done
—  learn from it and move on.
The terrible thing is that it's impossible to tear the past out by the roots.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
the past is a liarfull of promises it can't keepbut like a foolish first loveyou keep going back to it
— Jennifer (Alex) Oliveira, Alex's Spilled Ink
Let go of the past and cling to the future.
— Dr. Reverend Garry A. Scheuer Jr.