Past And Future Quotes

“There are times in our lives when we have to realize our past is precisely what it is, and we cannot change it. But we can change the story we tell ourselves about it, and by doing that, we can change the future.”
― Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters

“If you want to fly on the sky, you need to leave the earth. If you want to move forward, you need to let go the past that drags you down.”
― Amit Ray, World Peace: The Voice of a Mountain Bird

“Like other ghosts, she whispers; not for me to join her, but so that, when I'm close enough, she can push me back into the world.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“I don't think humanity just replays history, but we are the same people our ancestors were, and our descendants are going to face a lot of the same situations we do. It's instructive to imagine how they would react, with different technologies on different worlds. That's why I write science fiction -- even though the term 'science fiction' excites disdain in certain persons.”
― Kage Baker

“The past has been there all along, reminding us: This time--maybe, hopefully, against all odds, we will get it right.”
― Leslie T. Chang

“The arrow of time obscures memory of both past and future circumstance with innumerable fallacies, the least trivial of which is perception.”
― Ashim Shanker, Only the Deplorable

“Normality wasn't in the days I'd left behind me: it was only to be found in whatever fortune placed in my path each morning.”
― Maria Duenas

“On the night Sam went missing, it occurred to Sadie that nothing in life was as solid-state as it appeared. A childish game could be deadly. A friend might disappear. And as much as a person might try to shield herself from it, the possibility for the other outcome was always there. We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn't chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living. Sometimes, it felt as if you might be walking down Brattle Street, and without warning, you could slip into this other life, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole that led to Wonderland. But it wouldn't be strange like Wonderland, not at all. Because you would have expected all along that it could have turned out that way. You would feel relief, because you had always wondered what that other life would have looked like. And there you were.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Although I am no longer caught in the past, the future seems like a ridiculous thing to me. Try to catch it, hold it in your hand. It disappears every time.”
― Alice Hoffman, Green Heart

“He wanted to leave the past a few hundred miles down the road, shake it off like dust. But that ws the problem with the past. It kept finding him.”
― Suzanne Woods Fisher, The Keeper: A Novel

“He may actually have been existing in the past and approximating a conceivable future, which brought even the assumption of his immediate perceptions as being in the present into doubt. And thus, he couldn’t—beyond a hint of skepticism—say that he truly existed right now and in this moment, but instead it seemed more rational to assume that he simply existed and nothing more.”
― Ashim Shanker, Don't Forget to Breathe

“In the process of letting go you will lose many things from the past, but you will find yourself.”
― Deepak Chopra

“Be not so foolish as to cling to what was, rather than embrace what can be.”
― Dean Koontz, The Forest of Lost Souls

“You must learn some of my philosophy.

Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“You can’t count on things happening tomorrow just because they happened in the past. It’s faulty logic.”
― Suzanne Collins, Sunrise on the Reaping

“Life is just three days -
yesterday, today, tomorrow;
yesterday is gone,
tomorrow may not come,
all we have is today -
so in actuality,
life is just one day, today -
rest is either memory or imagination.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The God Sonnets: Naskar Art of Theology

“Inasmuch as relics are a reminder of history, your past shouldn't be a bridge between what was and what remains for gossips, rumours and personal attacks.”
― Eduvie Donald

“I wonder why it's wrong to be sentimental. People are so contemptuous of feeling. 'You wouldn't catch me ME sitting alone and mooning,' they say. 'Moon' is what they say when they mean remember, and they are so proud of not remembering. It's strange, how they pride themselves upon their lacks. 'I never take anything seriously,' they say. 'I simply couldn't imagine,' they say, 'letting myself care so much that I could be hurt.' They say, 'No one person could me that important to ME.' And why, why do they think they're right?”
― Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories

“Let’s never say ‘tomorrow,’ because all we ever have is the moment. People think there’s a future, but there really isn’t, not if we want to be totally honest with ourselves. There’s the past, which we might wish desperately that we can change, and there’s now. If we don’t seize the now with all our might, it becomes just another part of the past that we end up wishing we could change.”
― Dean Koontz, The Other Emily

“Looking back, we see ourselves. Looking forward, we see an idol we can never reach. The past is who we are today, and the future is a soothing lullaby guiding us to dream.”
― Rafsan Al Musawver

“The past is retrievable, yes, but it most certainly cannot be changed.”
― Colum McCann, Twist

“Don’t bring the past into the present and don’t project the present into the future.”
― Brittany Burgunder

“The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there–but why is the past so different from the future?”
― Stephen Hawking, The Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe

“Usually the wedding that wasn't is an off-limits topic for me, but the damn Canyon Ranch counselor told me that I will never fully move forward to the future I deserve until I am able to claim the whole event as an important part of my past.

Ouch. (p47)”
― Stacey Ballis, Wedding Girl

“I think the hardest part of letting go of the past is trusting that the future holds something better.”
― L.M. Dalgleish, Guarded King

“I remember everything. I remember everything so much that I am being crushed under the weight of it all. If I weren't so horribly defined by everything I've ever loved and lost, maybe I could be the kind of person who moved through life easily.”
― Sasha Peyton Smith, The Rose Bargain

“The past, like a tangled ball of yarn, eventually straightened itself out. I'd been strong so far, and I would continue to be. I knew that the accident that made the Time Rewinder unusable made me who I was today. My life may be like a piece of gum someone chewed and spat out, but I would endure it and extract every last molecule of sweetness from it.”
― Gu Byeong-mo

“Learning from history is important to building our future. We should not ignore the mistakes of past leaders, nations, and people. They are tools for us; their destruction can be our instruction.”
― Brian Simmons, Courage to Conquer: 365 Devotions from Joshua, Judges, and Ruth

“Your past is meaningless. We all have a shared future and that’s what is important.”
― Luc Jorgart, The Wild Dogs of Kumamoto

“Out of all things, there is only one with no present or future, and that is the past. In most cases, this is fortunate, but in some, it is not. Remember the past, learn from it, yet avoid reliving it.”
― Boris Zubry