Quotes about the past

Wrongs committed in the distant past are far easier to condemn than to rectify.

If only Jupiter would give me back

The past years and the man I was...

"We have had a glorious past—but a glorious past is bitterness for a child with a hopeless future."

We are all engaged in looting the past. (Only the greatest geniuses manage to steal from the future.)

"So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our mind. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little."

The older we get the more we seem to think that everything was better in the past. Old people a century ago wanted to go back two centuries, and two centuries ago they wished it were three centuries earlier. Never has there been an age that people have been satisfied with. But in recent years the pace of progress has been so precipitous that conditions in our own country go somewhat beyond the ordinary. The changes that have taken place since the Restoration of 1867 must be at least as great as those of the preceding three and a half centuries.

Whatever you've been until today is already over, and while you can almost always learn from it, and sometimes change effects that are continuing into the present, you cannot undo what you have done.

I...think about being hungry, being cold, being hurt, being ridiculed, as if it were in another life than this.

This damned room - it's saturated with the past. . . .It's all the rooms I've ever slept in, all the streets I've ever walked in. Now the whole thing moves in an ordered, undulating procession past my eyes. Rooms, streets, streets, rooms. . . .

As the young reporter listens, it dawns on him that it is not the South that he longs for but the past, the South's past and his own past, neither of which, in the way that he has been driven by homesickness to think of them, ever really existed, and that it is time for him to move out of the time gone by and into the here and now — it is time for him to grow up. When the sermon is over, he goes back downtown feeling that the old man has set him free, and that he is now a citizen of the city and a citizen of the world.

She could remember the girl she used to be with fondness, but it wasn’t a youth she cared to recapture.

That was the danger of being old and a politician. Habits outlived the situations that created them. Policies remained in place after the situations that inspired them had changed. The calculus of all human power was changing, and the models she used to make sense of it shifted with them, and she had to keep reminding herself that the past was a different place. She didn’t live there anymore.

WE EXPERIENCE LIFE AS A CONTINUITY, AND ONLY AFTER IT FALLS away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float.