Past Quotes

• Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.

  

  Thomas Sowell
  • World
  • Liberty
  • Social

• My own literary interest is more about excavating the past, or sensing the past inside the present. This requires all kinds of exclusions and sleights of hand. There's an admittedly antiquarian flavor to it, even though there's enough of the present included to lull the reader.

  

  Teju Cole
  • Kind
  • Interest
  • Reader

• 'The UnAmericans' is a compassionate and brilliantly rendered debut - and for a book set largely in the past, these stories feel essential to understanding the contemporary world in which we live.

  

  Jesmyn Ward
  • World
  • Live
  • Book

• How readily we wish time spent revoked, that we might try the ground again where once--through inexperience, as we now perceive--we missed that happiness we might have found!

  

  William Cowper
  • Trying
  • Past
  • Wish

• We are desperately in need of the kind of smart diplomacy that has worked for America in the past. If you use force, it should be a last resort. And it needs to be used with full understanding of the consequences.

  

  Hillary Clinton
  • America
  • Past
  • Diplomacy

• If you look into the past of the successful painter you will find square miles of canvas behind him.

  

  Charles Webster Hawthorne
  • Canvas
  • Painter
  • Miles

• You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is.

  

  William Faulkner
  • Real
  • Past
  • Know

• As I let go of the past, the past let go of me.

  

  Keith Donohue
  • Past
  • Let Go

• 'Johnny' was a coping mechanism who could take those things which could have ordinarily destroyed me, by tweaking my past and throwing it back out there, getting laughs from things that would have otherwise upset me.

  

  Johnny Vegas
  • Past

• There's no going back from what happened. You can go back and understand the past, but you can't go back and change it.

  

  Dana Reinhardt
  • Past
  • Understand
  • Happened

• Writers are the main landmarks of the past.

  

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
  • Past
  • Writers
  • Landmarks

• And be grateful. Our scars have the power to remind us that the past was real.

  

  Thomas Harris
  • Real
  • Past
  • Grateful

• Most of my books have caused distribution and printing problems in the past.

  

  Peter Sotos
  • Past
  • Books
  • Distribution

• She would fain have caught at the skirts of that departing time, and prayed it to return, and give her back what she had too little valued while it was yet in her possession. What a vain show Life seemed! How unsubstantial, and flickering, and flitting! It was as if from some aerial belfry, high up above the stir and jar of the earth, there was a bell continually tolling, ‘All are shadows!—all are passing!—all is past!

  

  Elizabeth Gaskell
  • Life
  • Giving
  • Shadow

• I admire about Hillary: Every time I am going to walk away from her candidacy, I think, she has absorbed more hate than anyone I can think of over the past twenty years, and she hasn't cracked under it. That's a kind of iron fortitude that maybe we need in the President of the United States. People project on to Hillary because she is a woman. They either hate her for everything they hate about women or they long for her to be everything they want in a woman. It's an impossible burden.

  

  Sara Paretsky
  • People
  • Thinking
  • Long

• A nation has a soul, a spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other in the present. One is the possession of a rich legacy of memories; the other is the desire to live together and to value the common heritage.

  

  Ernest Renan
  • War
  • Together
  • Soul

• The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I walk around.

  

  Jonathan Lethem
  • Past

• I've always felt like a foreigner wherever I've lived. I don't feel much towards my Italian or Scottish roots, although I do cook the pasta at home.

  

  Tom Conti
  • Home
  • Feels
  • Cooks

• Considering the fact that I've used it in the past, and know what it is, and seen the results of it, I don't view marijuana as a dangerous drug.

  

  Tim Robbins
  • Facts
  • Drug
  • Dangerous

• The future has a lot to do with the past.

  

  Dwight Yoakam
  • Future
  • Past

• There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves

  

  Ray Bradbury
  • Dark
  • Shadow
  • Majority

• Who can think wise or stupid things at all that were not thought already in the past.

  

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Past
  • Wise
  • Stupid

• A man whose yesterdays rest on his horizon travels forward into his past. The result is that he goes a very long way to nowhere.

  

  Catherine Anderson
  • Men
  • Long
  • Way

• Each soil has had its own history. Like a river, a mountain, a forest, or any natural thing, its present condition is due to the influences of many things and events of the past.

  

  Charles Kellogg
  • Influence
  • Mountain
  • Natural

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