In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises.
Chance, you've gone past something you couldn't afford to go past; your time, your youth, you've passed it. It's all you had and you've had it.
Good! he wanted to cry out to her. Good! Because you only had to see it! I had to wear it!
He recognized it and knew it. In others—clients, witnesses, or sometimes adversaries, he had seen or heard it: A gesture, a phrase, or a tone which exposed unintended truth in the beat of a second.
Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.
A body can't run from what they done. They carry it with them inside. It fester and spread like poison if it's buried. It gotta be out in the air where it can heal.
When you are living in the present, you know what's important now for you and you act on that knowing.
Some of my best friends here in New York have pasts I have a hard time reconciling with the people I'm close to now. But I wouldn't change them - or their pasts - for anything in the world. Their experiences are what made them the people they are tod...
The easiest way to leave the past behind is to remember that love does not live in the past, only memories — love lives in the present.
Letting go is to love yourself enough to look at the past with a different perspective. It is to accept that you can't change the past, but that you can change whether your perspective poisons or nourishes you.
I think archaeologists are stuck, and we are losing our past at a very rapid rate. Tens of thousands of sites will be lost, and we've only unveiled a tiny percent of the past.
I think when two people get together, their past is their past. Their reputations are reputations. You can only take someone the way you find them... on face value.
You realize yourself when you start reflecting - because I don't live in the past, although your past is so much a part of what you are - that you can't ignore it. But I don't look at scrapbooks.
J has told me about his past. I know what happened and why. But he is the one person who made me believe in my talent and whatever happened in the past, he's been a wonderful manager to me.
When rough times have fallen upon our state in the past, Texans have always responded with generosity and an eagerness to help. The compassionate response to the fires has proven that this community spirit is alive and well.
The reason to split a court is for administrative purposes, and in the past there has been much debate about the liberal decisions of the Ninth Circuit and so forth; and people have wanted to get out of the Ninth Circuit for that reason.
The paradox is that when we model future designs on past successes, we are inviting failure down the line; when we take into account past failures and anticipate potential new ways in which failure can occur, we are more likely to produce successful ...
Yes, it is long past time we get serious about tackling the nation's ever-growing deficits. But the average American family drawn into serious debt cannot just threaten to stiff its creditors. It must cut its spending in the future, but also take res...
Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patte...
There's a great deal of scientific evidence that social connectedness is a very strong protector of emotional well-being, and I think there's no question that social isolation has greatly increased in our culture in, say, the past 50 years, past 100 ...
It is this compulsion to look backwards at a time of crisis because one's got no idea of what lies ahead. There is a notion of security that somehow it must resemble the past. It's never going to. Just because we muddled through in the past doesn't m...
