Past Quotes
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To admit regret is to understand that we are fallible - that there are powers beyond us. To admit regret is to lose control not only of a difficult past but of the very story we tell about our present. To admit sincere and abiding regret is one of our greatest but unspoken contemporary sins.
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Thoughtful people are concerned with the future because that is the only area of experience about which anything can be done. We cannot change the past, and the present is gone as soon as it is reported, but the future is that in which we can make a difference.
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You can't dwell in your past but move forward, look forward. That's it.
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A very great deal is written about the future of book publishing - much more than on its present or past - and the only takeaway from all these oracles seems to be that a great empire will be destroyed.
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Too many people dwell on the past: the thing is to get on with life.
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Unfortunately for the modern dramatist, during the past century and a half the public realm has been less and less of a realm where human deeds are done, and more and more of a realm of mere human behavior. The contemporary dramatist has lost his natural subject.
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I absolutely believe the past had its share of warrior women who fought like men. Whether some of these were the actual Amazons from Greek myth is another matter.
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I don't dwell in the past; I don't wallow in old events and emotions. I don't waste time on regret. No use going over and over the details of what already happened.
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We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.
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Your brother is still young enough to believe that the past still exists, he said. That the injustices within it await his remedy.
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Gratitude is a humble emotion. It expresses itself in a thousand ways, from a sincere thank you to friend or stranger, to the mute, up-reaching acknowledgment to God--not for the gifts of this day only, but for the day itself; not for what we believe will be ours in the future, but for the bounty of the past.
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Every story about me is so heavy and dramatic. That's not how I do life. But that's the impression people have, and that's what keeps getting reiterated. As if I'm still stuck in all the muck of the past. And I am so not.
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They say every writer really just writes about one thing over and over. I guess my one thing is how the past impacts the present.
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Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past.
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The past 6 and a half years have been the most amazing years of my life. It's sad it has come to an end but Avril and I are still family and moving forward in the most positive way possible.
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Three days: Today, Tomorrow and Yesterday, I know, Yet if the past were cancelled within the here and now And then the future hidden, I could regain that Day Which I, before I was, had lived in God's own way.
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Live in the present, remember the past, and fear not the future, for it doesn't exist and never shall. There is only now.
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I think about my mother every day. But usually the thoughts are fleeting - she crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye: startling, luminous, lovely... gone.
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When I was a child and came with my elders to Galway for their salmon fishing in the river that rushes past the gaol, I used to look with awe at the window where men were hung, and the dark, closed gate.
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With cult foods, there is an underlying assumption that the best cooking ideas came generations ago. Yet culinary innovation is nothing to be ashamed of. When a chef tells me he is cooking with his grandmother's recipe, I always wonder why. Did talent skip the past two generations?
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To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter.'
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With the tentacles of branding reaching into every crevice of youth culture, leaching brand-image content not only out of street styles like hip-hop but psychological attitudes like ironic detachment, the cool hunt has had to go further afield to find unpilfered space and that left only one frontier: the past.
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When I think of ages past That have floated down the stream Of life and love and death, I feel how free it makes us To pass away.
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When every fact, every present or past phenomenon of that universe, every phase of present or past life therein, has been examined, classified, and co-ordinated with the rest, then the mission of science will be completed. What is this but saying that the task of science can never end till man ceases to be, till history is no longer made, and development itself ceases?
