The future needed service, not pity, not piety; but in the past lay darkness, confusion, waste, and all the cramped primitive minds, bewildered, torturing one another in their stupidity, yet one and all in some unique manner, beautiful.
Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.
Be careful who you choose for an enemy because that is who you become most like, Anna tosses Nietzsche's quote up into the air. She serves up words she has heard me say in the past.
When every minute of your day is planned & you are packed for days, you shall soon realize that the pain of past fades, vision of life gets clearer and all that seemed to poison your life Ceases to exist.
Our ability to look back on the past, our need or desire to make sense of it, is both a blessing and a curse; and our inability to see into the future with any degree of accuracy is, simultaneously, the thing that saves us and the thing that condemns...
A wise man, once he is past fifty, does not befuddle his senses with strong drink, nor make violent love in the cool spring night, nor dance on his hands.
Haven't my past sermons taught you anything?" "Yes," Emilie threw at him, "that you pray for those who are close to God, and those who aren't, who Him, you toss away like garbage.
Just because you felt like a failure in the past, doesn't mean you can't get back up again and make something better of your future.
She didn’t watch the dead, ancient bone-chess cities slide under, or the old canals filled with emptiness and dreams. Past dry rivers and dry lakes they flew, like a shadow of the moon, like a torch burning.
We can accept and embrace our pasts as part of the path that shaped who we are now.
Have you noticed," she asked him, "how we live much of our lives in the past and most of the rest of it in the future? Have you noticed how often the present moment slips by quiet unnoticed?
Memory is fiction . . . All memory is a way of reconstructing the past. . . The act of narrating a memory is the act of creating fiction. [Armitstead, Claire. “Damon Galgut talks about his novel In a Strange Room.” The Guardian. 10 September 2010...
No matter how much you stress or obsess about the past or future, you can't change either one. In the present is where your power lies.
What followed was for him a very entertaining spectacle, with one of Edward's brothers seemingly intent upon the most subtle of seductions and the other barely able to force malmsey past the gorge rising in his throat.
But as in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of today, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.
Forgetting is like a great alchemy free of secrets, limpid, transforming everything to the present. In the end it makes our lives into this visible and tangible thing we hold in our hands, with no folds left hidden in the past.
p 18 - Hundreds of thousands of years ago our ancestors of the dim and distant past faced the same problems which we must face in the same primeval forest. That we are here today evidences their victory.
Our view of history diminishes the reality of the past. We concentrate on the historic event as something that has happened, and in so doing we ignore it as a moment which, at the time, is happening.
I think we’re losing sight of what our ultimate goal is here,” said Genevieve. But we feared that if she was washed out, people would look right past the flyer.
Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk.
Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.
