quotations about the past
The myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
ZADIE SMITH
White Teeth
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
There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.
EUGENE O'NEILL
A Moon for the Misbegotten
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
The past is a closed door.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
Sometimes we need a map of the past. It helps us to understand the present, and to plan the future.
JOSEPHINE HART
Damage
The past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
History-writing is a way of getting rid of the past.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
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 is always a rebuke to the present.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
"Fugitive's Reunion"
Evidence about the past is always partial, perspectival, and biased.
GEORGE WECKMAN
"Remembering the past", The Athens Messenger, April 1, 2016
The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too.
EUGENE O'NEILL
Long Day's Journey Into Night
Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Dance Dance Dance
Inheriting the past is to take part in a story that is still being told today.
LEO WU
"Where the past meets the present: Preserving historic homes in Alhambra", Alhambra Source, March 27, 2016
Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.
JANE AUSTEN
Pride and Prejudice
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Atoms of Thought
When we look back on our past there is often an element of fiction that enters the picture. The colours seem brighter or darker, the people more delightful or cruel, events are collapsed, mixed and reconfigured. Nevertheless our visions seem utterly convincing, at least to ourselves.
LAETITIA WILSON
"Questions at the heart of identity", The West Australian, April 1, 2016
It's harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future.
WILLIAM GIBSON
The Paris Review, summer 2011
I cannot see, then, any rational or logical ground for that mighty difference in the value which mankind generally set upon the past and future, as if the one was everything, and the other nothing--of no consequence whatever. On the other hand, I conceive that the past is as real and substantial a part of our being, that it is as much a bona fide, undeniable consideration in the estimate of human life, as the future can possibly be. To say that the past is of no importance, unworthy of a moment's regard, because it has gone by, and is no longer anything, is an argument that cannot be held to any purpose; for if the past has ceased to be, and is therefore to be accounted nothing in the scale of good or evil, the future is yet to come, and has never been anything. Should any one choose to assert that the present only is of any value in a strict and positive sense, because that alone has a real existence, that we should seize the instant good, and give all else to the winds, I can understand what he means (though perhaps he does not himself); but I cannot comprehend how this distinction between that which has a downright and sensible, and that which has only a remote and airy existence, can be applied to establish the preference of the future over the past; for both are in this point of view equally ideal, absolutely nothing, except as they are conceived of by the mind's eye, and are thus rendered present to the thoughts and feelings. Nay, the one is even more imaginary, a more fantastic creature of the brain than the other, and the interest we take in it more shadowy and gratuitous; for the future, on which we lay so much stress, may never come to pass at all, that is, may never be embodied into actual existence in the whole course of events, whereas the past has certainly existed once, has received the stamp of truth, and left an image of itself behind.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
"On the Past and Future", Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners