Johnny Mindell > Johnny's Quotes

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.”
― Bill Keane

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“The past is never where you think you left it.”
― Katherine Anne Porter

“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.”
― Mother Theresa

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can't relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don't know if there is one.”
― George Harrison

“It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

“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.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“Sooner or later we've all got to let go of our past.”
― Dan Brown, Deception Point

“Your past is always your past. Even if you forget it, it remembers you.”
― Sarah Dessen, What Happened to Goodbye

“The past is a ghost, the future a dream and all we ever have is now.”
― Bill Cosby

“When you understand, that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Study the past if you would define the future.”
― Confucius

“The past is always tense, the future perfect.”
― Zadie Smith

“Frustration and Love can’t exist in the same place at the same time, so get real and start doing what you would rather be doing in life. Love your life. All of it. Even the heavy shit that happened to you when you were 8. All of it was and IS perfect.”
― Jason Mraz

“No man is rich enough to buy back his past.”
― Oscar Wilde

“What's past is prologue.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down....”
― Kate Morton, The House at Riverton

“My past is everything I failed to be.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Someone needs to tell those tales. When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There's magic in that. It's in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift. Your sister may be able to see the future, but you yourself can shape it, boy. Do not forget that... there are many kinds of magic, after all.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“Well I haven't fucked much with the past,
But I've fucked plenty with the future.

- Babelogue”
― Patti Smith, Patti Smith Collected Lyrics, 1970-2015: Lyrics, Reflections & Notes for the Future

“I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“How many people long for that "past, simpler, and better world," I wonder, without ever recognizing the truth that perhaps it was they who were simpler and better, and not the world about them?”
― R.A. Salvatore, Streams of Silver

“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic - now mercifully stilled, thank God - might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion as it had before.”
― Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

“If only. Those must be the two saddest words in the world.”
― Mercedes Lackey