quotations about the past
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
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
When it comes to the past, EVERYONE writes fiction.
STEPHEN KING
Joyland
We live in such constant nearness to the abyss of past time that the moment is endlessly sucked into.
JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN
Pulphead
The past is always a rebuke to the present.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
"Fugitive's Reunion"
The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Nova
The world to come must be composed of what is past. No other material is at hand.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Cities of the Plain
We are afraid to dwell upon the past, lest it should retard our future progress; the indulgence of ease is fatal to excellence; and to succeed in life, we lose the ends of being!
WILLIAM HAZLITT
"On the Past and Future", Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners
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
The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too.
EUGENE O'NEILL
Long Day's Journey Into Night
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
To remember is to re-member, almost as if by re-membering we give something body again. It is no longer so much in the past, but being called to mind and brought into the present. To re-member is to re-present. And so we are saying that something in the past is not gone, it is here and now, in effect, if nothing else.
PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA
"Past Painfully Present", America Magazine, March 28, 2016
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
Evidence about the past is always partial, perspectival, and biased.
GEORGE WECKMAN
"Remembering the past", The Athens Messenger, April 1, 2016
The myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
ZADIE SMITH
White Teeth
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
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
The past is essentially unknowable: we remake it in our image. Things do not speak for themselves -- we must make them speak.
PAUL MCAULEY
interview, Infinity Plus
When then time is passing, it may be perceived and measured; but when it is past, it cannot, because it is not.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions