PAST QUOTES VI
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
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
The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Nova
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
Learn from the past--don't wear it like a yoke around your neck.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
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
The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for the dying.
JOHN BERGER
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
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
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
It is a sentimental error ... to believe that the past is dead.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
The past could be jettisoned ... but seeds got carried.
JOAN DIDION
Where I Was From
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
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
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 speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action. What its great thinkers have thought and written on the deepest problems of life, shall we not hear and enjoy?
FELIX ADLER
Founding address of New York Society for Ethical Culture, May 15, 1876
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
Men attach more or less importance to past and future events according as they are more or less engaged in action and the busy scenes of life. Those who have a fortune to make, or are in pursuit of rank and power, think little of the past, for it does not contribute greatly to their views: those who have nothing to do but to think, take nearly the same interest in the past as in the future. The contemplation of the one is as delightful and real as that of the other. The season of hope has an end; but the remembrance of it is left.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
"On the Past and Future", Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners