overcoming the past Quotes

“That’s what my dad is like-he really disappeared a long time ago, which is maybe why it didn’t bother me much.”

“You are not your history or your past. You are however, what you choose to do with your present and future. The biggest breakthrough of your life will be when you realize that life truly happens from you and not to you.”

“What had happened to T.J. in the night I did not understand, but I knew that it would not pass. And I cried for those things which had happened in the night and would not pass.”

“Promise yourself to forget the mistakes of the past and press on the greater achievements of the future.”

“I pause to look up at this massive school—two blocks square and seven stories high, a place that was meant to nourish us and prepare us for adulthood. But because we dared to challenge the Southern tradition of segregation, this school became, instead, a furnace that consumed our youth and forged us into reluctant warriors.”

“There have been times over the years when I’ve tried to leave Hailsham behind, when I’ve told myself I shouldn’t look back so much. But then there came a point when I just stopped resisting.”

“The right question is whether we as society need people who have emerged from some kind of trauma - and the answer is that we plainly do. This is not a pleasant fact to contemplate. For every remote miss who becomes stronger, there are countless near misses who are crushed by what they have been through. There are times and places, however, when all of us depend on people who have been hardened by their experiences.”

“Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and light-hearted as before.”

“Tonight will ring in a wonderful new year for me. How humbly grateful I am to be rid of the old one.”

“He could imagine some people thinking that he was walking to outpace the memories of the world he’d left behind...”

“As President Lincoln said in his time, ‘The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.’ ”

“I want to say, I never cared about your past. But that isn’t true. It’s only then that I realize: Peter wasn’t the one who needed to get over Genevieve. It was me. All this time with Peter, I’ve been comparing myself to her, all the ways I don’t measure up. All the ways our relationship pales next to theirs. I’m the one who couldn’t let her go. I’m the one who didn’t give us a chance.”

“Our past may explain why we’re suffering but we must not use it as an excuse to stay in bondage.”

“I’m still trying to forgive myself for all the things I failed to become. I’m still trying to make peace with all the broken pieces of my past.”