quotations about the past
What's past is prologue.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The Tempest
It is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.
WILLIAM H. GASS
The Tunnel
You are young ... the past is nothing to you, not even another country as it is to the old, or a nightmare as it is to the guilty.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Bones
Learn from the past--don't wear it like a yoke around your neck.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
I passionately scrutinize this past, in order to reconstruct from its scattered bits the illusion of a future.
OCTAVE MIRBEAU
The Diary of a Chambermaid
The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for the dying.
JOHN BERGER
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Nova
The past is understood as some kind of utopian ideal, once tangible as the present, then forever out of reach with the effect of passing years.
LAETITIA WILSON
"Questions at the heart of identity", The West Australian, April 1, 2016
Is there any good reason why we cannot extend our multi-cultural generosity to include another dimension? That of time. The past, too, is another country. Its ghosts may look strange and frightening and slightly misshapen in body and mind, but all the more reason then, to welcome them to our shores.
MARTIN AMIS
lecture at Harvard University, January 30, 1997
The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
H. G. WELLS
The Discovery of the Future
It is a sentimental error ... to believe that the past is dead.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Not heaven itself upon the past has power;
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
JOHN DRYDEN
Imitation of Horace
The past could be jettisoned ... but seeds got carried.
JOAN DIDION
Where I Was From
A man who denies his past is a man who truly denies himself a future, for he refuses to know himself.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
The past is always a rebuke to the present.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
"Fugitive's Reunion"
Ye come and go incessant; we remain
Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past;
Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot,
Of faith so nobly realized as this.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
The Cathedral
The past scampers like an alley cat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
The world to come must be composed of what is past. No other material is at hand.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Cities of the Plain
When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
The past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea