the past Quotes

“Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!”

“Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.”

“Our identities are always changing and growing, they’re not meant to be pinned down. Our histories are never all good or all bad, and running from the past is the surest way to be defined by it. That’s when it owns us. The key is bringing light to the darkness - developing awareness and understanding.”

“Things without all remedy should be without regard: what’s done is done.”

“The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable. There were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their evil real.”

“I don’t live in either my past or my future. I’m interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you’ll be a happy man. Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we’re living now.”

“We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.”

“Everyone has a past, but that’s just it—it’s in the past. You can learn from it, but you can’t change it.”

“The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without colour, pain or past.”

“Perhaps--I want the old days back again and they’ll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears.”

“The past can be escaped only by embracing something better, and he figured that was what she’d done.”

“When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”

“How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?”

“Perhaps that’s why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present.”

“Respect the past; you never know how it may affect you.”

“At my age, I should not be afraid of anything—certainly not my own past.”

“Live in the present, remember the past, and fear not the future, for it doesn’t exist and never shall. There is only now.”

“I had decided to study not history, but historians. I suppose my interest came from the sense of groundlessness I’d felt since learning about the Holocaust and the civil rights movement--since realizing that what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others. I knew what it was to have a misconception corrected--a misconception of such magnitude that shifting it shifted the world. Now I needed to understand how the great gatekeepers of history had come to terms with their own ignorance and partiality. I thought if I could accept that what they had written was not absolute but was the result of a biased process of conversation and revision, maybe I could reconcile myself with the fact that the history most people agreed upon was not the history I had been taught.”

“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.”

“You have blotted out the past for me, far more effectively than all the bright lights of Monte Carlo.”

“Strange, what brings these past things so vividly back to us, sometimes!”

“The past and the present are within my field of inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer.”

“A fresh start gives us the chance to reflect on the past, weigh the things we’ve done, and apply what we’ve learned from those things to the future. If we don’t examine the past, we don’t learn from it.”

“Sometimes, when people have a low opinion of their own worth—or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives—they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don’t believe that they deserve any better—so they don’t go looking for it. Or, perhaps, they don’t want the trouble of better. Freud called this a ‘repetition compulsion.’ He thought of it as an unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of the past—sometimes, perhaps, to formulate those horrors more precisely, sometimes to attempt more active mastery and sometimes, perhaps, because no alternatives beckon. People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results. It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it. It’s partly fate. It’s partly inability. It’s partly … unwillingness to learn? Refusal to learn? Motivated refusal to learn?”

The best way to say, “Thank you, God,” is by letting go of the past and living in the present moment, right here and now.

When you surrender and let go of the past, you allow yourself to be fully alive in the moment.

The past can’t hurt you anymore, not unless you let it.

Not enjoying what is happening right now is living in the past and being only half alive.

Letting go of the past means you can enjoy the dream that is happening right now.

“But when we really delve into the reasons for why we can’t let something go, there are only two: an attachment to the past or a fear for the future.”

“Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it.”

“A story can be new and yet tell about olden times. The past comes into existence with the story.”

“We haven’t re-created the past here. The past is gone. It can never be re-created. What we’ve done is reconstruct the past—or at least a version of the past. And I’m saying we can make a better version.”

“Without a past you can’t have a future.”

“Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is.”

“That’s what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays.”

“No one should be entirely judged by their past.”

“He said, ‘You saw her snip the cord.’ ‘Yeah. So?’ But even as I said it, I knew it was a big deal. ‘This is not happening,’ Grover mumbled. He started chewing at his thumb. ‘I don’t want this to be like the last time.‘”

“All the events of your past have formed a lens, or paradigm, through which you see the world. And since no one’s past is exactly like anyone else’s, no two people see alike.”

“That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.”

“Like someone who has imperfect vision, we see things, which are remote from us; so much light the Supreme Ruler still gives to us; when they draw nigh, or are, our intellect is altogether void; and except what others bring us, we know nothing of your human state.”

The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future.

“After all, guilt and remorse were worthless emotions, weren’t they? Well, I knew they weren’t; but I had no time for them. Forward motion; that was the key. Run as fast as you can and don’t look back.”

“Perhaps I should have run the other way right then and there, realizing that a guy like this might bring out the worst in me.”

“My body was broken—just how badly I wouldn’t find out until later—but I felt healed. Healed at last. I laughed.”

“In retrospect, I remember feeling somewhat relieved - that the chaos and insanity would finally be behind me.”

“Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry - all forms of fear - are cause by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.”

“It had been good being around the living again instead of moping around with the ghosts of her past.”

“There are two levels to your pain: the pain that you create now, and the pain from the past that still lives on in your mind and body. Ceasing to create pain in the present and dissolving past pain - this is what I want to talk about now.”

“I can’t change where I come from or what I’ve been through, so why should I be ashamed of what makes me, me?”

“Mr. Stott had warned him that he would not be able to change the past. He had explained that everything he did would be something that had already happened. Which meant that trying to convince his friends he was a time traveler would be a dead end. He had already failed! With less than an hour to burn, he had to make the most of his time.”

“The doors to the world of the wild are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.”

“I stare at Clare, standing before me, and I am sorry to be here, sorry to ruin her Christmas. “I’m sorry, Clare. I didn’t mean to put all this sadness on you. I just find Christmas… difficult.”

“Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start that day’s serious work of beating back the past.”

“It’s funny how memory erodes. If all I had to work from where my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded and soft, with a few sharp moments standing out.”

“Henry is glancing around us, worrying that readers, co-workers are noticing us, searching his memory, realizing that some future self of his has met this radiantly happy girl standing in front of him.”

“The future was sunset; the past was something to leave behind. And if it didn’t stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out.”

“Sometimes I would give anything to open up Henry’s brain and look at his memory like a movie. I remember when I first learned to use a computer; I wanted to push my hands though the screen and get the real thing in there, whatever it was. I like to do things directly, touch the textures, see the colors. ”

“And this astoundingly beautiful amber-haired tall slim girl turns around and looks at me as though I am her personal Jesus. My stomach lurches. Obviously she knows me, and I don’t know her. Lord only knows what I have said, done, or promised to this luminous creature.”

“There is no stage you comprehend better than the one you have just left.”

“We may not have a future, but you can’t deny we have a past.”

“Back in the time when life was easy, the Internet would have told me what I needed to know. The great thing about the Internet was it didn’t care why you were asking.”

“I am conducting conversations with Henry as though he were here with me, as though he could see through my eyes, think with my brain.”

“But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day.”

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”

“To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The ‘better life’ she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one.”

“They are living in the moment. They are not ashamed of the past; they are not worried about the future. Little children express what they feel, and they are not afraid to love.”

“I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.”

“But I would help him as best I could. And I would try to keep friendship with him, maybe plant a few ideas in his mind that would help both me and the people who would be his slaves in the years to come. I might even be making things easier for Alice.”

“These people were my relatives, my ancestors. And this place could be my refuge.”

“The place, the time would either kill him outright or mark him somehow.”

“Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.”

All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.

″...a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment...”

“But in the meantime, you got to remember, you can’t always judge people by the things they done. You got to judge them by what they are doing now.”

“Yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream.”

“I certainly do know heaps of stories, but I learned most of them from Gramps. Gram suggested I tell one about my mother. That I could not do. I had just reached the point where I could stop thinking about her every minute of every day.”

“Remember this also: it’s always easy to look back and see what we were, yesterday, ten years ago. It is hard to see what we are. If you can master that trick, you’ll get along.”

“As sure as time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he’ll look for his lessons.”

“Some towns … want to talk about what happened, about the past. Other towns, discussion of the past is discouraged. We went to a place once where the children didn’t know the world had ever been different, although you’d think all the rusted-out automobiles and telephones wires would give them a clue.”

“I had agreed with Mother to look to the future, but secretly I dreamed of returning to the past.”

″‘It is hard for you, little one,’ said Aslan. ‘But things never happen the same way twice. It has been hard for us all in Narnia before now.‘”

“One form of perseverance is the daily discipline of trying to do things better than we did yesterday.”

“Death holds up an all-seeing mirror, ‘the mirror of past actions’, to our eyes, in which the consequences of all our negative and positive actions are clearly seen and there is a weighing of our past actions in the light of their consequences, the balance of which will determine the kind of existence or mental state we are being driven to enter.”

“Abandon your notions of the past, without attributing a temporal sequence! Cut off your mental associations regarding the future, without anticipation! Rest in a spacious modality, without clinging to [the thoughts of] the present. Do not meditate at all, since there is nothing upon which to meditate. Instead, revelation will come through undistracted mindfulness — Since there is nothing by which you can be distracted.”

“But there’s nothing to be done about it. All I can do is put in time waiting for the inevitable, observing as the ghosts of my past rattle around my vacuous present. They crash and bang and make themselves at home, mostly because there’s no competition. I’ve stopped fighting them.”

″‘And look at those other steps—the broad, shallow ones—going up to that doorway. It must have been the door into the great hall.’ ‘Ages ago, by the look of it,’ said Edmund.”

″‘And there were Dwarfs. And there were lovely little Fauns in all the woods. They had feet like goats. And—’ ‘That’s all nonsense, for babies,’ said the King sternly.”

“Even my best and only friend Ricky didn’t believe me, and he’d been there.”

“Atonement was powerful; it was the lock on the door you closed against the past. ”

“So many black families spend all of their time trying to fix the problems of the past. That is the curse of being black and poor, and it is a curse that follows you from generation to generation. My mother calls it ‘the black tax.’ Because the generations who came before you have been pillaged, rather than being free to use your skills and education to move forward, you lose everything just trying to bring everyone behind you back up to zero.”

“My dad explained it to me: Grandpa had told him some of the same stories when he was a kid, and they weren’t lies, exactly, but exaggerated version of the truth.”

“We are not prepared to go where we need to go. So we do not clearly see the need to end something, or we maintain false hope, or we just are not able to do it. As a result, we stay stuck in what should now be in our past.”

“Time stood still, and it shared with me all that had been, and all that was to come.”

“The day dawned, and already the time of youth was fleeing the house which the three giants of my dreams had built. ”

“It was the Lunas who carried the charter from the Mexican government to settle the valley. That took courage.”

“They understood that I had to be away from the places that held the memories of my friend.”

“Ay, every generation, every man is a part of his past.”

“The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It’s what they’ve come from. It’s what they endure. The child knows that they won’t talk any more because if he knows too much about what’s happened to them, he’ll know too much too soon, about what’s going to happen to him.”

“I never did learn anything out of my past life, now I have to suffer again.”

“To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all at the same time.”

“Freedom or death lay at this table. Her past and future were seated on a glass throne.”

″... this is what the past is for! Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for a future that only He can see.”

“You can never put it back together like it was.”

“For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how. You’ll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place

“Every day the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time”

“For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you.”

“‘We all bear scars, Dorian. Mine just happen to be more visible than most.’”

“People reflexively assume that competition is always a good thing, that it always brings out the best in people, but that’s only true of people who can forget the competition. The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past.”

“I want to remember . . . Because it happened to me. And I’m still me.”

“For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how.”

“The days when you could act out of your noble instincts are over. Except of course, you here in Europe don’t yet seem to know it.”

“The past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.”

“In running from her past, Mommy has created her own nation, a rainbow coalition.”

“There, in childhood, there had been something really pleasant with which it would be possible to live if it could return. But the child who had experienced that happiness existed no longer, it was like a reminiscence of somebody else.”

“Three decades ago, in a top story of the century, Americans placed six flags on the Moon. Today we no longer try for new and bold space achievements; instead we celebrate the anniversaries of the past.”

“You are very good. But it strikes me that there is a want of harmony between your present mood of self-sacrifice and your past mood of self-preservation.”

″... but comfortable as her life had been there she could not go back. The anti-climax would be too intolerable; and her return might bring reproach upon her idolized husband.”

“All stories told have been told before. We tell them to ourselves, as did all men who ever were. And all men who ever will be. The only things new are the names.”

“Guess we better get started, get this over with, so we can go back to work.”

“No one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box. ”

“There’s always been a lottery. ”

“Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon. ”

“To forgive is merely to remember only the loving thoughts you gave in the past, and those that were given you.”

“For better or for worse, we ate the fruit of knowledge long, long ago.”

“From everything you told me, both of us did some pretty wrong stuff when we were younger. And both of us had second chances.”

“I’m very good at the past. It’s the present I can’t understand.”

“In school, we learned about the world before ours, about the angels and gods that lived in the sky, ruling the earth with kind and loving hands. Some say those are just stories, but I don’t believe that. The gods rule us still. They have come down from the stars. And they are no longer kind.”

“Somehow, long ago, my little kid’s brain had pasted together pieces of overheard conversations: When Mom was a teenager, I started making her belly fat.”″

“Neither question nor answer was meant as anything more than a polite preamble to conversation. Both [Rahel] and [Comrade Pillai] knew that there are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot – that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways-staring eyes.”

“My salad days, When I was green in judgment, cold in blood. ”

″So thank you, Justin. Sincerely. My very first kiss was wonderful. And for the month or so that we lasted, and everywhere that we went, the kisses were wonderful. You were wonderful.”

“I am a stranger in this church. Indeed, I have not been here since spring of 1692, so long ago now that it seems but a dim memory, and the girl I was at that time seems certainly like another person. Me and yet not me, that young girl. For she was as innocent to the dangers around her as my own baby daughter who now sleeps peacefully in my arms.”

“Hostile to the past, impatient of the present, and cheated of the future, we were much like those whom men’s justice, or hatred, forces to live behind prison bars.”

“Well, that’s all in the past. Tomorrow, I’ll start finding out what life is really like.”

“This book probably makes it seem like I hate myself and everything I do. But that’s not totally true. I mostly just hate every person I’ve ever been. I’m actually fine with myself right now.”

“That truth first came to light a few weeks ago, at a party, with Hannah directly in front of me. An amazing moment when everything seemed to be falling into place.”

″(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Enacted on this same divan or bed; I who have sat by Thebes below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead.)”

“Do You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember Nothing?”″

“Never regret your past. Rather, embrace it as the teacher that it is.”

“In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”

“April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.”

“He had been so intent on finding the cattle that he had forgotten all the events of the past days and past years. Hunting the cattle was good for that. Old Betonie was right.”

“O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.”

“He was getting disgusted at this increasing nostalgic preoccupation with the past. It was a weakness, he knew, a weakness he could scarcely afford if he intended to go on.”

“Lies are never forgotten, they go on and they grow.”

“Regrets over yesterday and the fear of tomorrow are twin thieves that rob us of the moment.”

“I don’t know. I have a lot of dreams about my ex-wife, Catherine, where we’re friends like we used to be. We’re not gonna be together, we’re not together, but we’re friends still. She’s not angry.”

“I just... I caught myself thinking about it over and over. And then I realized that I was simply remembering it as something that was wrong with me. That was the story I was telling myself - that I was somehow inferior. Isn’t that interesting? The past is just a story we tell ourselves.”

“My counsel to you is to make sure your mirror is set so that you can see the past without allowing it to distract you from the present.”

“I don’t feel anything when I’m with them. I don’t even see them. I see you. I taste you. And when they ask me who Tessa is, because that’s the only name I’m saying in their ear, you wanna know what I tell them?” She sniffs loudly and her lip trembles, but she doesn’t answer. And I don’t wait for her to, either. I lean closer, brushing my nose against her cheek and up to her temple. “I tell them she’s the worst fucking thing that ever happened to me, and I can’t let her go.”

“It’s Riot Gear. It’s retro. It’s beat up to look like one of the big twentieth-century riots. It’s been big since earlier this week.”

“Well, we all make mistakes, dear, so just put it behind you. We should regret our mistakes and learn from them, but never carry them forward into the future with us.”

“Her neck scars are a road map, too, aren’t they? Places she’s been best not to remember”

“We start out a million years ago in a small community on some grassy plain; we hunt animals, have children, and develop a rich social, sexual, and intellectual life, but we know almost nothing about our surroundings.”

“Nostalgia is not what it used to be.”

“This they tell, and whether it happened so or not I do not know; but if you think about it, you can see that it is true.”

“Not back to that me, not to that six-seven year old ventriloquist’s dummy dressed in a white evening suit. Not to that charlatan born-must I have no charity for me?

“You need not fear it, but you must always bear in mind that the past is never quite as finished with you as you think you are with it.”

“Do not lose yourself in the past. Do not lose yourself in the future. Do not get caught in your anger, worries, or fears. Come back to the present moment, and touch life deeply. This is mindfulness.”

“Do not lose yourself in the past. Do not lose yourself in the future. Do not get caught in your anger, worries, or fears. Come back to the present moment, and touch life deeply. This is mindfulness.”

“I feel like the oldest person in the world with the longest stretch of life before me.”

“She isn’t stupid. She’s intelligent enough in a purely feminine way. Eighteenth-century France would have been a marvelous setting for her, or the old South if she hadn’t made the mistake of being born a Negro.”

“I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else. I will never feel the pressure of peers or the burden of parental expectation. I can view everyone as pieces of a whole, and focus on the whole, not the pieces.”

“I have learned to observe, far better than most people observe. I am not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present because that is where I am destined to live.”

“All of the time Juana had been trying to rescue something of the old peace, of the time before the pearl. But now it was gone, and there was no retrieving it. And knowing this, she abandoned the past instantly.”

“Something like that happened to me, you know. I ... I’m not exactly sure what it was. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another ... If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!”

“You don’t want to abandon the skills and experience you have gained,but to find a new way to apply them. Your eye is on the future, not the past.Often such creative readjustments lead to a superior path for us—we are shaken out of our complacency and forced to reassess where we are headed.”

“No worry, lass. I’ve been hurt by much worse, and by people much less pretty.”

“Always, he wonders why and how he has let four months—months increasingly distant from him—so affect him, so alter his life. But then, he might as well ask—as he often does—why he has let the first fifteen years of his life so dictate the past twenty-eight. He has been lucky beyond measure; he has an adulthood that people dream about: Why, then, does he insist on revisiting and replaying events that happened so long ago? Why can he not simply take pleasure in his present? Why must he so honor his past? Why does it become more vivid, not less, the further he moves from it?”

“History is a conversation and sometimes a shouting match between present and past, though often the voices we most want to hear are barely audible.”

“But as the scissors snip-snapped through her hair and the razor shaved the rest, she realized with a sudden awful panic that she could no longer recall anything from the past. I cannot remember, she whispered to herself.”

“All answers lie beyond the gate of experience.”

“Captain Vince used to fly a helicopter for the Coast Guard, until he lost a let in a dangerous rescue mission.”

“This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently.”

“In those days we had everything. Everything a man could want. Even things to complain about. Before the mountain failed.”

“I bet you don’t know anyone else called Elsa. There was just this lion called Elsa, years ago. There was a book written about her, and they made a film. They sometimes show it on the television so maybe you’ve seen it. My mum called me after Elsa the lion. I was a very tiny baby, smaller than all the others in the hospital, but I was born with lots of hair. ”

“I bet you don’t know anyone else called Elsa. There was just this lion called Elsa, years ago. There was a book written about her, and they made a film. They sometimes show it on the television so maybe you’ve seen it. My mum called me after Elsa the lion. I was a very tiny baby, smaller than all the others in the hospital, but I was born with lots of hair. ”

“Each patient demands that we suspend our sense of what is normal and accept that we are dealing with a dual reality: the reality of a relatively secure and predictable present that lives side by side with a ruinous, ever-present past.”

“The best thing we can do with the failures of the past is to let them be history.”

“In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.”

“He knew them like I knew them. Passed to him. Passed them to his little brother. Passed to my older brother. Passed to me. The Rules have always ruled. Past present future forever.”

“Everything that happened this past summer, and every summer before it, has all led up to this. To now.”

“We all make mistakes, have struggles, and even regret things in our past. But you are not your mistakes, you are not your struggles, and you are here NOW with the power to shape your day and your future.”

“My past has not defined me, destroyed me, deterred me, or defeated me; it has only strengthened me.”

“How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.”

“The old world is tangible, solid, we live in it and are struggling with it every moment — it exists. The world of the future is not yet born, it is elusive, fluid, made of the light from which dreams are woven.”

“I get that his memory is erased. But is our whole friendship erased too? Being boys with someone isn’t just a bunch of stuff you did together in the past. There has to be more to it than that! But right now, it’s like we’ve got zero in common with the guy.”

“The past is over and done. We cannot change that now. Yet we can change our thoughts about the past. How foolish for us to PUNISH OURSELVES in the present moment because someone hurt us in the long-ago past.”

“Do not seek familiarity, do not keep searching for your past in your future. Trust what comes.”

“You have to let go. You have to let go because when you hold on, when you keep something alive inside of you, you are allowing for your past to take up the space in your heart and in your mind that is meant for your future.”

“All the events you have experienced in your lifetime up to this moment have been created by the thoughts and beliefs you have held in the past.”

“I write for relief. I write for healing. I write to view the past more clearly and place myself firmly in the center of Love.”

“Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed.”

″‘Barrabas came to us by sea’, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. She was already in the habit of writing down important matters, and afterward, when she was mute, she also recorded trivialities, never suspecting that fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own.”

“It is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.”

“My past is everything I failed to be.”

“As if in a trance, M.C. gazed out over the rolling hills. He sensed Sarah moving through undergrowth up the mountainside. As if past were present. As if he were a ghost, waiting, and she, the living.”

“I felt myself still reliving a past which was no longer anything more than the history of another person;”

“Love blinds. We have both tried to give our sons, not what they needed, but what we needed. We’ve been so busy trying to rewrite our own pasts, we’ve blighted their present.”

″...there has to be a real reason to love the past. Not just that you can’t accept the present, or can’t live in it.”

“With my past forgiven, my present secure, and my future irrevocably guaranteed, why shouldn’t I be enthusiastically optimistic?”

“The robbers of time are the past and the future. Man should bless the past, and forget it, if it keeps him in bondage, and bless the future, knowing it has in store for him endless joys, but live fully in the now.”

“We drag our past behind us like a weight, still shackled, but far enough back that we never have to see, never have to openly acknowledge who we once were.”

“If I return to the past, I might be able to set things right.”

“Is there not shade enough in all this boundless forest to hide thy heart from the gaze of Roger Chillingworth?”

“I am he whom you sold and dishonored—I am he whose betrothed you prostituted—I am he upon whom you trampled that you might raise yourself to fortune—I am he whose father you condemned to die of hunger—I am he whom you also condemned to starvation, and who yet forgives you, because he hopes to be forgiven—I am Edmond Dantès!”

If the wind and the rain had driven away the intervening years, had scattered all the intervening objects, had swept us to the churchyard where we first stood face to face on such different levels, I could not have known my convict more distinctly than I knew him now as he sat in the chair before the fire. No need to take a file from his pocket and show it to me; no need to take the handkerchief from his neck and twist it round his head; no need to hug himself with both his arms, and take a shivering turn across the room, looking back at me for recognition. I knew him before he gave me one of those aids, though, a moment before, I had not been conscious of remotely suspecting his identity.

Her appearance is changed greatly, her character much more so; and the person who is compelled, of necessity, to be her companion, will only sustain his affection hereafter by the remembrance of what she once was, by common humanity, and a sense of duty!