Past quotes
10.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"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."
"I found a Bill Evans record in the bookcase and was listening to it while drying my hair when I realized that it was the record I had played in Naoko's room on the night of her birthday, the night she cried and I took her in my arms. That had happened only six months earlier, but it felt like something from a much remoter past. Maybe it felt that way because I had thought about it so often-too often, to the point where it had distorted my sense of time."
"If one generation is expected to carry an excessive burden on behalf of another, it will seek by every means to avoid it. It will either demand that past promises are broken, or it will not work, or it will not pay taxes, or the most talented people will leave. Socialist governments which have tried to tax 'till the pips squeak' have ample experience of that."
"If you are a star in Hollywood then you are always a star in your eyes, but not always in the eyes of new directors for whom your great performances are always fading into the past."
"The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly."
"New Mexico has been, in the past, a swing state."
"When you visualize the recent past, do you see it as being somewhere over on the left?"
"It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and sorrow."
"With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader."
"Her future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing; she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder and harder; she found the image of the intense and varied life she yearned for, and despaired of, becoming more and more importunate."
"... it is because sympathy is but a living again through our own past in a new form, that confession often prompts a response of confession."
"Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history."
"My lungs taste the air of Time,Blown past falling sands."
"The cultural influences in our country are like the floo floo bird. I am referring to the peculiar and especial bird who always flew backward. To keep the wind out of its eyes? No. Just because it didn't give a darn where it was going, but just had to see where it had been."
"That was one of the reasons why I wanted to tell the story of Colin Price. I saw someone in this fictionalized political character that was trying to do something important for his city. He meant well, but then you see that the human flaws had really derailed his past. It seems to be happening more and more in our country. I wanted to hold a mirror up to that."
"For my part, I wish, with Mr. Howells, that the literature of the past might be purged of all that is ugly and barbarous in it, although I should object as much as any one to having these great works weakened or falsified."
"I find that fact and fancy look alike across the years that link the past with the present."
"Say no ill of the yeere, till it be past. [Say no ill of the year till it be past.]"
"The thing that pleases me the most about it is that young people like it. It's given kids from 6 to 16 an alternate view of music to what's been available for the past 20 years."
"If a car comes past me in a traffic jam with a boom box going, I jump out of my skin. Those big booming basses. I'm just more sensitive to noise these days."
