Woodrow Wilson claimed that history endows us with the "invaluable mental power we call judgment.
I always thought of grief as a blow that took everything out of you. And it is like that. But it stays, past that first hard hit. It stays and blows its breath into you. It's always there, reminding you of what you've lost. What's gone.
All the bad in my life led me to her, which makes me think that I can live with the past if she is my future. —HEW
There is no surer or more illuminating way of reading a man's character, and perhaps a little of his past history, than by observing the contexts in which he prefers to use certain words.
It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.
...while the stony bones of the world tore past and the air grew dark and howling. The last thing he saw as the gulley became a torrent of dust and rock was the Jeep, plucked backwards into space.
It's like there was a fellow in every man that's done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.
Shadows go in front of you, leading into your future, and trail behind you, leaving a part of you in the past. They are clearest when we are in the light, and disappear when we lose ourselves in darkness.
Sometimes things just slip past you, into your hands and out through your fingers. In my half-in/half-out state I began to wonder if that could happen to people, too.
People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.
The king who stepped into the ballroom wearing a green velvet robe and bejeweled crown was none other that the tiger-man who'd prowled through my nightmares and nearly every waking moment for the past two days. Chorda.
Opponents past and present have the same essential weakness about them: first they want to use you, then they want to be you, then they want to snuff you out.
Even if you time travel your past, it can't be changed, likewise you can't possibly change your future, it is always the present which matters.
Give me your past, all your pain, all your anger, all your guilt. Release it to me, and I will be a safe harbor for the life you need to leave behind.
For many people it is the notion of time that makes them feel restless – that there just aren't enough hours in the day, that they are rushing, either on an hourly or daily basis or that life was somehow better in the past or will be so in the futu...
Dimly--at first wary that it was merely a dislodged fragment of the dream--she remembered Resurgam. And then, slowly, events returned, not as a tidal wave, or even as as landslide, but as a slow, squelching slippage: a disembowelment of the past.
No matter what she'd done in our past, I would always want her. I could turn away and show restraint a thousand times, and it would never lessen the hunger I had for that woman.
The present is an age of talkers, and not doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and doat on past achievements.
Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened.
On the day the world is blown up, the playwright whose show opened the night before will be leafing past the news section of the to find his review--as he ascends through the stratosphere, oblivious.
The past was worth remembering and knowing in its own right. It was not behind us, never truly behind us, but under us, holding us up, a foundation for all that was to come and everything that had ever been.
