PAST QUOTES IV
quotations about the past
See, there's nothing wrong with the past; the past is a good thing, but that's not all there is.
PAT BENATAR
interview, AV Club, August 26, 1997
Life would be no better than candlelight tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
My past is everything I failed to be.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet
It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.
CHARLES DICKENS
David Copperfield
Youth, hope, and love:
To build a new life on a ruined life,
To make the future fairer than the past,
And make the past appear a troubled dream.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
The Masque of Pandora
The past is such a curious creature,
To look her in the face
A transport may reward us,
Or a disgrace --
EMILY DICKINSON
"The past is such a curious creature"
Keep out of the Past! for its highways
Are damp with malarial gloom;
Its gardens are sere and its forests are drear,
And everywhere moulders a tomb.
Who seeks to regain its lost pleasures,
Finds only a rose turned to dust;
And its storehouse of wonderful treasures
Are covered and coated with rust.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Keep Out of the Past"
When I think over the past, I am like a person whose eyes cannot properly measure distances and is liable to think things extremely remote which on examination prove to be quite near.
ANDRE GIDE
If It Die
The only past which endures lies wordlessly within you.
FRANK HERBERT
God Emperor of Dune
Our most merciless enemy is our past.
MAXIM GORKY
Untimely Thoughts
The past is never where you think you left it.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
Ship of Fools
What is it about the past? I can never understand it. Why is it so powerful? Why does it appeal to us as if it had some extraordinary pearl of meaning that we can't find in our present lives?
JOHN BANVILLE
"Oblique dreamer", The Guardian, September 17, 2000
Old events have modern meanings; only that survives
Of past history which finds kindred in all hearts and lives.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"Mahmood the Image-Breaker"
All the past is not worth one today.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"New Year"
We sometimes condemn the present, by praising the past; and show our contempt of what is now, by our esteem for what is no more.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Moral Maxims
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
The Great Gatsby
A chorus of voices, the past alive in everything, that sea upon which the present tossed and rode.
WILLIAM GIBSON
All Tomorrow's Parties
The world is weary of the past,
Oh, might it die or rest at last!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Hellas
The past was another country and one which the movement of time's tectonic plates pulled further away every year.
MICHAEL MARSHALL
The Upright Man
How easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Written on the Body