Almost all sadness comes from thinking about the past, and all worry from thinking about the future — present-mindedness is your only safe haven.

Nothing helps a man to reform like thinking of the past with regret.

…before you, life was desolate – the past hardly worth remembering – and now, each moment a keepsake I can’t throw away …

Sometimes it’s more painful to draw to mind the good times

Who knows what’s for true once a time is past? There’s no way to prove how something was that’s gone. And if a time is gone, what does it matter? It’s all rain into rivers...

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

Just because The Past always hung there upon its hooks on the game-room wall, you didn’t have to pull it down and use it on yourself.

A long time ago someone told me that a story will tell itself, when it’s ready.

When you’re in love with two people, always choose the second. The fact that you are constantly thinking of the second person makes it obvious that the first will never fulfill you, unless the second...

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...

Guilt is an indulgence, it entangles you in the past.

I keep coming back to certain books, and you—to try to find myself again

when you shoot for the stars, you can’t ever look back.

The past lives through us. We are its legacy.

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...

MOTHER TIME: Life goes by so very fast, my dears, and taking the time to reflect, even once a year, slows things down. We zoom past so many seconds, minutes, hours, killing them with the...

VIEW FROM A HILLI am not yet quite over it.I am lying down on top of it.Surveying behind me a wastelandOf dried-up promise.While the lights below twinkleWith dull mocking uncertainty.There isn’t much left to look...

The past is set down in a thousand thousand indelible scrolls. But the future is a blank parchment forever in wait of a present.

She didn’t want to forget how deeply she had loved him, how important it had been to her; she felt as if to discard the memory would be a betrayal of her younger self.

The present is an eternal attempt to separate the past from the future.

Every moment is precious, even the ones behind me that I often reflect upon with a reserved smile. However…I seldom look back, only forward in anticipation of the next greater now.

Whether beautiful or terrible, the past is always a ruin.

…how time packs new years over the old ones but how those old years are still in there, like the earliest, tightest rings centering a tree, the most hidden, enclosed in darkness and shielded from...

MOTHER TIME: The past is always with us, dear, for better or worse. It is what it is and you can’t change it. All you can do is learn how to live with it in...

Have you ever listened to a song from a long time ago; from your past; a song that was filled with so many memories tied to it, that you felt it so deeply- that it...

It is we who move through time, not the reverse. When we walk beyond any one of life’s instants, it becomes nothing more than a receding milestone. We can look back, but we cannot retrace...

Things didn’t really go away. You just learned to push them deeper.

You NEED to look back to remember the awesome memories, to remember the positive lessons you have learned, to help someone else learn from what you have lived and to see how far you have...

We perceive, as from a great distance, a thousand years filled with dim shapes of men moving blindly, performing strangely, in an unreal shadowy world.

When I look back on my childhood, my earliest memories seem like artifacts from a long-lost civilization: half-understood fragments behind museum glass.

The ascendancy over men’s minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised,...

The one plentiful herds of magazine writers would continue to be culled – by the Internet, by the recession, by the American public, who would rather watch TV or play video games or electronically inform...

I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.

Our identities are tremendously warped and distorted by yesterday’s trauma and tomorrow’s expectations.

The past should always remain in the past because the present needs your attention.

For some, excavating the past isn’t an adventure, it’s more akin to tearing a Band-Aid off an open wound.

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.

The nostalgia of a moment’s love can be an illusionary precipice from which we fall from truth; in heartbreak, what we escape to in the past is what tortures us in the present.

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....

in these shitty plastic days …

It follows that the one thing we should not do to the men and women of past time, and particularly if they ghost through to us as larger than life, is to take them out...

in the past” and ignored, but in doing so, you sweep it under a rug where it doesn’t go away with time – it becomes time itself, and takes on the illusion of life as...

It does not matter how much we distance ourselves, how far we run – the past always shadows us.

The past is buried deep within the ground in Rabat, although the ancient walls in the old city are still standing, painted in electrifying variations of royal blue that make the winding roads look like...

One thing about past challenges I never let go of: the fact that I made it through, survived, and learned a great deal.

The Englishman left months ago, Hana, he’s with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit.

What if you were wrong? What if everything you ever believed was a lie? What if you missed your opportunity because you didn’t know your worth? What if you settled on familiar, but God was...

To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.

If a memory wasn’t a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be...

We cannot change the past, she thought. How we long to sometimes, trying to work out how horror might have been averted by a fluke of fortune, a kind intercession, wisdom not yet granted.