PAST QUOTES IV
quotations about the past
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My past is everything I failed to be.
FERNANDO PESSOA
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The Book of Disquiet
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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 referred to as being dead; but it is terribly alive.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
I have put off the past like a worn-out cloak.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
The Hour of the Dragon
It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
"Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number--"
The only past which endures lies wordlessly within you.
FRANK HERBERT
God Emperor of Dune
But we look ahead to the far off skies,
For the years are flying fast,
And we know that the present that round us lies
Ere the light of a few more moments dies,
Will with many loved and severed ties
Fade into the mist-veiled past.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"The Beautiful Past"
All the past is not worth one today.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"New Year"
It is yesterday that makes tomorrow so sad.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Our most merciless enemy is our past.
MAXIM GORKY
Untimely Thoughts
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
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
The Great Gatsby
An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other ... for only out of the past can you make the future.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men
The past is never where you think you left it.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
Ship of Fools
How easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Written on the Body
A chorus of voices, the past alive in everything, that sea upon which the present tossed and rode.
WILLIAM GIBSON
All Tomorrow's Parties
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"
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
Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
keynote address at the Open Source Convention, OSCON, July 24, 2002