PAST QUOTES IV
quotations about the past
Life would be no better than candlelight tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
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
It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.
CHARLES DICKENS
David Copperfield
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"
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
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"
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
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
The Great Gatsby
My past is everything I failed to be.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet
A chorus of voices, the past alive in everything, that sea upon which the present tossed and rode.
WILLIAM GIBSON
All Tomorrow's Parties
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
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
The world is weary of the past,
Oh, might it die or rest at last!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Hellas
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"
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"
The only past which endures lies wordlessly within you.
FRANK HERBERT
God Emperor of Dune
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
Beyond here lies nothin'
But the mountains of the past
BOB DYLAN
"Beyond Here Lies Nothin'"
How easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Written on the Body
What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?
JOHN ASHBERY
"37 Haiku"