The Past Quotes

“When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That's all.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories

“Your memory feels like home to me.
So whenever my mind wanders, it always finds it’s way back to you.”
― Ranata Suzuki

“When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“…the sad part is, that I will probably end up loving you without you for much longer than I loved you when I knew you.
Some people might find that strange.
But the truth of it is that the amount of love you feel for someone and the impact they have on you as a person, is in no way relative to the amount of time you have known them.”
― Ranata Suzuki

“You can accept or reject the way you are treated by other people, but until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed. You can bandage the bleeding with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with work, with cigarettes, with sex, but eventually, it will all ooze through and stain your life. You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories, and make peace with them”
― Iyanla Vanzant, Yesterday, I Cried

“If you cannot hold me in your arms, then hold my memory in high regard.
And if I cannot be in your life, then at least let me live in your heart.”
― Ranata Suzuki

“If you’re searching for a quote that puts your feelings into words – you won’t find it.
You can learn every language and read every word ever written – but you’ll never find what’s in your heart.
How can you?
He has it.”
― Ranata Suzuki

“how sad and bad and mad it was - but then, how it was sweet”
― Robert Browning

“I had someone once who made every day mean something.
And now…. I am lost….
And nothing means anything anymore.”
― Ranata Suzuki

“If you never tell anyone the truth about yourself, eventually you start to forget. The love, the heartbreak, the joy, the despair, the things I did that were good, the things I did that were shameful--if I kept them all inside, my memories of them would start to disappear. And then I would disappear.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire

“I miss that feeling of connection.
Knowing he was out there somewhere thinking about me at the same time I was thinking about him.”
― Ranata Suzuki

“Accomplishments don’t erase shame, hatred, cruelty, silence, ignorance, discrimination, low self-esteem or immorality. It covers it up, with a creative version of pride and ego. Only restitution, forgiving yourself and others, compassion, repentance and living with dignity will ever erase the past.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“He was both everything I could ever want…
And nothing I could ever have…”
― Ranata Suzuki

“The last time I felt alive – I was looking into your eyes.
Breathing your air…. touching your skin…
… Saying goodbye….
The last time I felt alive…. I was dying.”
― Ranata Suzuki

“Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“To get over the past, you first have to accept that the past is over. No matter how many times you revisit it, analyze it, regret it, or sweat it…it’s over. It can hurt you no more.”
― Mandy Hale, The Single Woman–Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass: Embracing Singleness with Confidence

“My father taught me that you can you read a hundred books on wisdom and write a hundred books on wisdom, but unless you apply what you learned then its only words on a page. Life is not lived with intentions, but action.”
― Shannon Alder

“Insecure people often falsify the past, in order to make the future pure.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“But there's a beginning in an end, you know? It's true that you can't reclaim what you had, but you can lock it up behind you. Start fresh.”
― Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Minds

“A deceitful man will go as far as to trample all over a woman’s reputation and spirit, in order to prove to his ex-love that he was faithful. The irony, is he is still in love with his ex and the new woman in his life doesn’t even realize it.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Live out of your imagination, not your history.”
― Stephen Covey

“The past is for learning from and letting go. You can't revisit it. It vanishes.”
― Adele Parks, Young Wives' Tales

“He looked at me like I was the stars when all I’d ever felt like was the dark nothingness between them.”
― Ranata Suzuki

“What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“Every city is a ghost.
New buildings rise upon the bones of the old so that each shiny steel bean, each tower of brick carries within it the memories of what has gone before, an architectural haunting. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of these former incarnations in the awkward angle of a street or filigreed gate, an old oak door peeking out from a new facade, the plaque commemorating the spot that was once a battleground, which became a saloon and is now a park.”
― Libba Bray, Lair of Dreams

“Nostalgia has a way of blocking the reality of the past.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“I know he wasn’t perfect…
But he did the best impression of it I’ve ever seen.”
― Ranata Suzuki

“I had always wanted to hear those words.
I had always wanted to be your girl.”
― Ranata Suzuki

“It’s not a crime to wish for other worlds. You’ll get taxed for it but they can’t throw you in jail for creating your own private world…yet. Dramatics are fun, an indulgence. ‘You can’t go backward,’ ‘You can’t live in the past,’ they tell you. Why not? ‘You’ve got to put all that behind you and move on to other things,’ they say. Bullshit! These are all expressions of modern disposability. It’s a mediocritizing technique—trying to get rid of what I call ‘past orthodoxies.’ It’s our past that makes us unique, therefore it’s our past that economic interests want to rob from us, so they can sell us a new, improved future. Society now depends on a disposable world—out with the old, in with the new, including relationships. But how we weep and wish we could hold onto those cherished moments forever, to those long-whispered dreams, those tortured nights—how we want to grasp them and stop them from sifting through our fingers. I say, ‘Don’t let it happen. Keep things the way you want them and let the rest of the world be duped.”
― Anton Szandor LaVey, The Secret Life of a Satanist: The Authorized Biography of Anton LaVey