I saw the patterns of history and thought that a human might be eighty per cent chemicals, eighteen per cent his past, and two per cent feeling, creatures of habit. Which makes psychiatrists really pharmacists who have to listen longer.
The flowers which played then among the grass, the water which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as environment to their apparition lingers around the memory of them still with its unconscious or unheeding air;...
I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial... I thought I knew a good deal about it all, I was sure I should not fail.
For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.
This girl, this impossibly sweet girl, was his present and his future, despite his past. Fate had to be smiling at him. He couldn't imagine life without this dark haired beauty. Those beautiful hazel eyes reached into his heart and took hold.
Sometimes you met someone that changed the pattern, who wormed their way past the cracks in your heart, caulked them up, sealed themselves in, and stayed there. Sometimes they did it by insisting you meet them at every step, as Jamie had done to me.
Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you're free. But a few measures more,...
New York is unruly, tangled. The city woos first, then mangles, then pastes back together in a fresh, dazzling mosaic.
I also wanted you to realize that even though the pain will always be there, I’m living proof you can get past this. Right now I know it feels impossible, but one day you’ll look back and see how far you’ve come.
A prayerless age will have but scant models of divine power. The age may be a better age than the past, but there is an infinite distance between the betterment of an age by the force of an advancing civilization and its betterment by the increase of...
Your past does not have to dictate your future. You have the God-given power to make your life better and to heal from divorce.
I learned very quickly that when you emigrate, you lose the crutches that have been your support; you must begin from zero, because the past is erased with a single stroke and no one cares where you’re from or what you did before.
Your child may be under more stress than you realize. Remember that situations around to past experiences. Just because you do not see something as a big deal does not mean it is not for your child.
because he was the man he was, one strong thing came out of the confusion: love. ‘Love’ had caused him trouble in the recent past, but he went with it anyway, stubbornly holding to the idea that ‘love’ — whenever and wherever it touched dow...
The improvisational ability to lead adaptively relies on responding to the present situation rather than importing the past into the present and laying it on the current situation like an imperfect template.
I don't know what happens after we die. It doesn't seem to me like there can be much past this. But I suppose I can conceive that what we make and do can last beyond us. Maybe in a different place, on another plane.
When a group of people get up from a table, the table doesn’t know which way any of them will go.
Francis Crozier believes in nothing. . It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities. Nothing he has learned in the past six months has persuaded him otherwise. Has it?
It was true that the city could still throw shadows filled with mystifying figures from its past, whose grip on the present could be felt on certain strange days, when the streets were dark with rain and harmful ideas.
In the Tunnel of Desire, past the Tube of Destiny, lies the Turtle of Doubt. We all have to face that turtle, but only the confident ones ever find out that doubt tastes like chicken.
Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between past, present, and future ultimately meaningless; to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that same eternity which it is said that God himself inhabit...
