Being In The Past Quotes

Where are you? In the past or in the future? It doesn't matter because if you are not in today you are in the wrong place! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

There will be no New Year for those who keep living in the older years! If you really want to enter a new year, shot all the doors behind you and stick yourself to the New Year where everything is ready for you to be designed by you! Every man is an artist and every artist has the power to create infinite things; just be in the present time and design your life! No man can design his life by being in the past because present time is the only studio we can do our work! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

It's not being in the past, but accepting who we were and being who we are. ~ Roisin Turner

Anything you don't want to deal with can always be written off as being "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 we think we know it. ~ A.J. Darkholme

This here," he said playing with it, "is a stone, and will, after a certain time, perhaps turn into soil, and will turn from soil into a plant or animal or human being. In the past, I would have said: This stone is just a stone, it is worthless, it belongs to the world of the Maja; but because it might be able to become also a human being and a spirit in the cycle of transformations, therefore I also grant it importance. Thus, I would perhaps have thought in the past. But today I think: this stone is a stone, it is also animal, it is also god, it is also Buddha, I do not venerate and love it because it could turn into this or that, but rather because it is already and always everything - and it is this very fact, that it is a stone, that it appears to me now and today as a stone, this is why I love it and see worth and purpose in each of its veins and cavities, in the yellow, in the gray, in the hardness, in the sound it makes when I knock at it, in the dryness or wetness of its surface. There are stones which feel like oil or soap, and others like leaves, others like sand, and every one is special and prays the Om in its own way, each one is Brahman, but simultaneously and just as much it is a stone, is oily or juicy, and this is this very fact which I like and regard as wonderful and worthy of worship. ~ Hermann Hesse

An action from a confused and suffering being in the past doesn't represent what that being is forever; it is only an expression of that being's suffering. And if we cling to resentment over past hurts, we simply increase our own suffering. ~ Noah Levine

But despite the scarcity of confrontation with whites in our neighborhood, race and racism permeated every aspect of our lives. Our parents taught us that in order to succeed, we 'had to be twice as good as white folks.' We were constantly being prepared to enter a world dominated by whites. ~ Junius Williams

The feeling of being lost in time and geography with months and years hazily sparkling ahead in a prospect of inconjecturable magic ~ Patrick Leigh Fermor

We'll run a lot of multiple sets - pro set, twin set, the box set, ... We'll run a lot of option plays and pass the ball more than in the past. ~ John Welch

There have been some terrible winters in Chicago, where it feels like I'm literally being punched in the face, and everyone walks around looking stunned like they've just witnessed a murder. ~ Cecily Strong

I came to realize that one single human being, comprehended in his depth, who gives generously from the treasures of his heart, bestows on us more riches than Caesar or Alexander could ever conquer. Here is our kingdom, the best of monarchies, the best republic. Here is our garden, our happiness. ~ Ernst Junger

I've always wanted to be an actor. I didn't get into this game to be the best improviser in the world. I didn't choose improv as a stepping stone, it just happened to become one. ~ Rob Corddry

We open the successive doors in Bluebeard's castle because each leads to the next by a logic of intensification which is that of the mind's own awareness of being. To leave one door closed would be not only cowardice but a betrayal - radical, self-mutilating-of the inquisitive, probing, forward-tensed stance of our species. We are hunters after reality, wherever it may lead. The risk the disasters incurred are flagrant. But so is, or has been until very recently, the axiomatic assumption and a priori of our civilization, which holds that man and truth are companions, that their roads lie forward
are dialectically cognate....We cannot turn back. We cannot choose the dreams of unknowing. We shall, I expect, open the last door in the castle even if it leads, perhaps because it leads, onto realities which are beyond the reach of human comprehension and control. We shall do so with that desolate clairvoyance, so marvelously rendered in Bartók s
music, because opening doors is the tragic merit of our identity. ~ George Steiner

As an actor, I endeavor to find the reason in the unreasonable. Because no one thinks they are being unreasonable or unrealistic or demanding or behaving madly. We all see ourselves as being justified. ~ Cate Blanchett

Man in the flesh is essentially imperfect. He may be described as being made in the image of God but is far from being God. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

This congregation of displaced persons had been brought together at a moment in time, in this room, by a few irrevocable mistakes of the past - those acts of rage, greed, lust, and revenge that ran like silent films in their heads, the actors driven by emotions that had gone cold and were now inexplicable. ~ V.S. Kemanis

We are all ashamed in one way or another. Who among us is not stained by the past? ~ Jenna Blum

1. A time machine on the shoulders of memories, two advisers: on the right shoulder there is good future, in the left past that is evil, two open rays of time in which consciousness travels.
2. A halo of knowledge within life, this is a recording of a projection, one who feels reality can feel the universe: the past, present and future, and that which is timeless.
3. The laugh of rage
Rap beat: Trumpet music ram there beat street rhythm boo boom bang bang there tudum pub bam pa bang boom boom
The laughter of rage and the bloody gloom in a smile in consciousness from an evil joke of reality from the fact that you are not worthy to live like everyone else. The ragged strings of the ever-laughing psyche, like the blinking light of madness where there is insight between light and darkness. The interrupted melody of the harmony of the soul. The silence of insight overcomes the mind, the light is visible, leading to a new dimension of thinking, because everything is visible through the transparent eyelids of the vigilance of fear, and only unconsciousness temporarily closes our eyes from fatigue in the realm of the subconscious.
4. Gangsta music: Car sound Wooo ooo woooo oo drum beat drums pap pap pap
Laughing grin of smiling reality from the fact that billions of internal realities of people form a single reality of the hidden chaos of egoism.
5. There is nothing cheaper than sins.
7. Patience gives friends.
8. The trumpet sounds a symp ~ Musin Almat Zhumabekovich.

FRESH GRIEF FEELS LIKE THIS: Your mind is a maze and every pathway leads to a bricked-up wall, the one where you can see the real world just on the other side, but you can't reach it. It's a feeling like someone's scooped out your insides with a spoon and all that's left is a shell that walks like you and talks like you, but your body and soul have parted ways for a time. Your senses don't fire and you can't connect with another human being because to string all that grief together like a strand of paper dolls would create something as powerful as an atom bomb - you'd implode. So you're all alone. And, for a short while, at least until it sinks in, you can fake anything. ~ Vikki Wakefield

Here's to the security guards who maybe had a degree in another land. Here's to the manicurist who had to leave her family to come here, painting the nails, scrubbing the feet of strangers. Here's to the janitors who don't understand English yet work hard despite it all. Here's to the fast food workers who work hard to see their family smile. Here's to the laundry man at the Marriott who told me with the sparkle in his eyes how he was an engineer in Peru. Here's to the bus driver, the Turkish Sufi who almost danced when I quoted Rumi. Here's to the harvesters who live in fear of being deported for coming here to open the road for their future generation. Here's to the taxi drivers from Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt and India who gossip amongst themselves. Here is to them waking up at 4am, calling home to hear the voices of their loved ones. Here is to their children, to the children who despite it all become artists, writers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, activists and rebels. Here's to international money transfer. For never forgetting home. Here's to their children who carry the heartbeats of their motherland and even in sleep, speak with pride about their fathers. Keep on. ~ Ijeoma Umebinyuo

How much does the iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones remember of the heart of the star in which they were born? And if they can forget that terrible, magnificent heat and light, what hope do I have of being more than an unremarkable footnote to you? ~ Seanan McGuire

The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence. In such moments activity is inevitable, and whether this activity is with brush, pen, chisel, or tongue, its result is but a by-product of the state, a trace, the footprint of the state. ~ Robert Henri

When this space comes into your being, you go on giving to each and everybody - not only to human beings but to animals, to the trees, to the faraway stars, because love is something that can be transferred even to the farthest star just by your loving look. Just by your touch, love can be transferred to a tree. Without saying a single word ... it can be conveyed in absolute silence. It need not be said, it declares itself. It has its own ways of reaching into the very depths, into your being. First be full of love, then the sharing happens. ~ Osho

His gaze was a lot steadier than her heartbeat. "She's the reason for those whispered phone calls I used to overhear, isn't she?"
"Don't be silly. I was talking to my lover."
"She told me she lives at a place called Brookdale. After I hung up, I did a little research on the Web. Your talent for obfuscation continues to amaze me."
"Hey, I haven't obfuscated in weeks. Makes you go blind. ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

So simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence. ~ Nan Shepherd

He also suffered from a certain amount of what he calls "reputational confusion," in which he became known for being over-the-top effervescent, and the reputation fed on itself. This was the persona that others knew, so it was the persona he felt obliged to serve up. ~ Susan Cain

Junior, stop being orner." It's what Mama used to say to us when we were little, and I say it to Junior out of habit. Daddy used to say it sometimes, too, until he said it to Randall one day and Randall started giggling, and then Daddy figured out Randall was laughing because it sounded like 'horny'. About a year ago I figured out what it was supposed to be after coming across its parent on the vocabulary list for my English class with Miss Dedeaux: 'ornery'. It made me wonder if there were other words Mama mashed like that. They used to pop up in my head sometime when I was doing the stupidest things: 'tetrified' when I was sweeping the kitchen and Daddy came in dripping beer and kicking chairs. 'Belove' when Manny was curling pleasure from me with his fingers in mid-swim in the pit. 'Freegid' when I was laying in bed in November, curled to the wall like I was going to burrow into another cover or I was making room for a body to lay behind me to make me warm. ~ Jesmyn Ward

In Dzokchen, compassion is much more than the virtue of loving kindness. Nor does the word compassion in the Dzokchen context denote its English etymological meaning, "suffering together" or "empathy," although both these meanings may be inferred. Essentially, compassion indicates an open and receptive mind responding spontaneously to the exigencies of an ever-changing field of vibration to sustain the optimal awareness that serves self-and-others' ultimate desire for liberation and well-being. The conventional meaning of compassion denotes the latter, active part of this definition, and, due to the accretions of Christian connotation, response is limited to specifically virtuous activity. "Responsiveness" defines the origin and cause of selfless activity that can encompass all manner of response. On this nondual Dzokchen path virtue is the effect, not the cause; the ultimate compassionate response is whatever action maximizes Knowledge - loving kindness is the automatic function of Awareness. ~ Keith Dowman

grief. We do and say strange things - sometimes bizarre things - when we are swallowed up in grief. No one should be hard on us when we say thoughtless and selfish things when we are in grief. Both Mary and Martha accused Jesus of being the cause of their brother's death by not responding immediately to their request: "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died" (John 11:21, 32). Jesus did not rebuke either of them. Instead, He wept with them (see John 11:35). So with all of us. He knows our frame; He remembers we are dust. ~ R.T. Kendall

To be free from all egoistic motive, careful of truth in speech and action, void of self-will and self-assertion, watchful in all things, is the condition for being a flawless servant. ~ Sri Aurobindo

In accepting and defending the social institution of slavery, the Greeks were harder-hearted than we but clearer-headed; they knew that labor as such is slavery, and that no man can feel a personal pride in being a laborer. A man can be proud of being a worker – someone, that is, who fabricates enduring objects, but in our society, the process of fabrication has been so rationalized in the interests of speed, economy and quantity that the part played by the individual factory employee has become too small for it to be meaningful to him as work, and practically all workers have been reduced to laborers. It is only natural, therefore, that the arts which cannot be rationalized in this way – the artist still remains personally responsible for what he makes – should fascinate those who, because they have no marked talent, are afraid, with good reason, that all they have to look forward to is a lifetime of meaningless labor. This fascination is not due to the nature of art itself, but to the way in which an artists works; he, and in our age, almost nobody else, is his own master. The idea of being one's own master appeals to most human beings, and this is apt to lead to the fantastic hope that the capacity for artistic creation is universal, something nearly all human beings, by virtue, not by some special talent, but due to their humanity, could do if they tried. ~ W.H. Auden

One gains a double benefit in writing about the past, conjuring up how things might have been, and at the same time acquiring a different perspective on the present. ~ Robert Harris

There was a muchacha who lived near my house. La gente del pueblo talked about her being una de las otras, "of the Others." They said that for six months she was a woman who had a vagina that bled once a month, and that for the other six months she was a man, had a penis and she peed standing up. they called her half and half, mita' y mita', neither one nor the other but a strange doubling, a deviation of nature that horrified, a work of nature inverted. But there is a magic aspect in abnormality and so-called deformity. Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to posess supernatural powers by primal cultures' magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his inborn extraordinary gift.

There is something compelling about being both male and female, about having an entry into both worlds. Contrary to some psychiatric tenets, half and halfs are not suffering from a confusion of sexual identity, or even from a confusion of gender. What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other. It claims that human nature is limited and cannot evolve into something better. But I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the heiros gamos: the coming together of opposite qualities within. ~ Gloria E Anzaldua

It lives and breathes in the light, because it has thousands of unfortunates toiling in the darkness. It lives and has its being in proud liberty because thousands are slaving for it, whose thraldom is the price of this liberty. This ~ Upton Sinclair

I don't need any explanation about what you do with your life. You and I ... we grew up together,and that's it. Yeah, we shared a lot of stuff back then, and we were there for each other when it mattered.
But neither one of us can fit into the clothes we used to wear , and this relationship between us is just the same.
It doesn't fit in our lives any longer.
We don't ... fit anymore. And listen., I didn't mean to get pissy in the truck, but I think you need to be clear on this.
You and I? We have a past. That's it.
That's ... all we'll ever have (Blay to Qhuinn) ... ~ J.R. Ward

I suppose what's similar about being on actor and being a priest is a certain perception of time. Eternity is a priest's business. But we all live in time. And what I'm doing is trying to make people aware of how the two coexist. That's what religion is, keeping that sense of eternity while being in time; trying to live accordingly. The Kingdom of God is here, now. That's what that's all about. ~ Deirdre Madden

So I couldn't just pack my blue IKEA sack and go - I had to do the right thing. I had to preserve what was left of the goodness in my soul. But for the record, this was exactly why I never wanted to have friends. So much for being an island. Thanks ~ Camille Perri

The critic has to do more of what the book critics and art critics have done in the past. Which is give you a context for understanding the restaurant, give you a better way to appreciate it, give you the tools to go in there and be a more informed diner who can get more pleasure out of the experience. ~ Ruth Reichl

He felt as if he were being violently emptied out, as if a big magnet were pulling his blood and fluids down into the earth. He was weeping again, unstoppably, his head like the chandelier in his grandparents' house in Buffalo, the one that was too high for them to reach and that every time he visited had one fewer bulb alight. His head was an old chandelier, going dark. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

In the past twenty years, we have lived through several cycles and we have always managed to buy under good terms and conditions at the right time. This has enabled us to build a solid group that is now the world number one. ~ Lakshmi Mittal

She might come in to bride-bed: and he laughed,
As one that wist not well of wise love's craft,
And bade all bridal things be as she would.
Yet of his gentleness he gat not good;
For clothed and covered with the nuptial dark
Soft like a bride came Brangwain to King Mark,
And to the queen came Tristram; and the night
Fled, and ere danger of detective light
From the king sleeping Brangwain slid away,
And where had lain her handmaid Iseult lay.
And the king waking saw beside his head
That face yet passion-coloured, amorous red
From lips not his, and all that strange hair shed
Across the tissued pillows, fold on fold,
Innumerable, incomparable, all gold,
To fire men's eyes with wonder, and with love
Men's hearts; so shone its flowering crown above
The brows enwound with that imperial wreath,
And framed with fragrant radiance round the face beneath.
And the king marvelled, seeing with sudden start
Her very glory, and said out of his heart;
"What have I done of good for God to bless
That all this he should give me, tress on tress,
All this great wealth and wondrous? Was it this
That in mine arms I had all night to kiss,
And mix with me this beauty? this that seems
More fair than heaven doth in some tired saint's dreams,
Being part of that same heaven? yea, more, for he,
Though loved of God so, yet but seems to see,
But to me sinful such g ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne

Don't be embarrassed about being loved. I'm not asking you for anything; just let me love you and play the piano again tonight, just once more, if I still have the strength to do it. In exchange I ask only one thing: If you hear anyone say that I'm dying, go straight to my ward. Let me have my wish. ~ Paulo Coelho

He touched my cheek softly, his eyes intense as they gazed into mine."You might have to teach me a little about the human world, but I'm willing to learn if it means being close to you." He smiled again, a wry quirk of his lips. "I'm sure I can adapt to 'being human' if I must. If you want me to attend classes as a student, I can do that. If you want to move to a large city to pursue your dreams, I will follow. And if, someday, you wish to be married in a white gown and make this official in human eyes I'm willing to do that, too." He leaned in, close enough for me to see my reflection in his silver gaze." For better or worse, I'm afraid you're stuck with me now. ~ Julie Kagawa

I don't know where I see myself next month let alone five years. My whole life is last minute. I enjoy the spontaneity of it; I like not knowing what I will do next or whether I will be in the country next week. I just enjoy being around a creative environment. ~ Amber Le Bon

Courage meant overcoming fear and doing one's duty in the presence of danger, not being unafraid. ~ Eugene B. Sledge

We declare that only man exists. This is not to say that material, inorganic nature and nonhuman beings-animals and plants-are in any sense unreal, insubstantial, or illusory because they do not so exist. We merely state that the reality of these nonhuman realms differs from that of human existence, whose primary characteristic is Da-sein (literally being-the-there) ... Man as man is present ... in a manner wholly different from ... inanimate things. ~ Medard Boss

When you live in the United States, with the roar of the free market, the roar of this huge military power, the roar of being at the heart of empire, it's hard to hear the whispering of the rest of the world. And I think many US citizens want to. I don't think that all of them necessarily are co-conspirators in this concept of empire. And those who are not, need to listen to other stories in the world - other voices, other people. ~ Arundhati Roy

I think in terms of being a New Yorker, as my friends would say, I don't take a lot of mess. I have no tolerance for people who are not thinking deeply about things. I have no tolerance for the kind of small talk that people need to fill silence. And I have no tolerance for people just not being a part of the world and being in it and trying to change it. ~ Jacqueline Woodson

Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep black space high up among many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived.

It looked like a woman's tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and variety of the dots. At length, I started to look for my time, but, although more and more specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn't find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn't make out so much as a pyramid. Yet as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at the very moment with great emotion, in intricate detail, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which whole worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped, in a never-ending cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life as we knew it- these things had been utterly forgotten- and I thought as I searched for it on the limitless band, "that was a good time then, ~ Annie Dillard

Strength is not in the body, it's in the mind. It doesn't lie in flexing your muscles and crushing those who oppose you. It lies in being the last one standing. By any means. At any cost. ~ Leah Raeder

Before leaving the earth altogether, let us as: How does Music stand with respect to its instruments, their pitches, the scales, modes and rows, repeating themselves from octave to octave, the chords, harmonies, and tonalities, the beats, meters, and rhythms, the degrees of amplitude (pianissimo, piano, mezzo-piano, mezzo-forte, forte, fortissimo)? Though the majority go each day to the schools where these matters are taught, they read when time permits of Cape Canaveral, Ghana, and Seoul. And they've heard tell of the music synthesizer, magnetic tape. They take for granted the dials on radios and television sets. A tardy art, the art of Music. And why so slow? Is it because, once having learned a notation of pitches and durations, musicians will not give up their Greek? Children have been modern artists for years now. What is it about Music that sends not only the young but adults too as far into the past as they can conveniently go? The module? But our choices never reached around the globe, and in our laziness, when we changed over to the twelve-tone system, we just took the pitches of the previous music as though we were moving into a furnished apartment and had no time to even take the pictures off the walls. What excuse? That nowadays things are happening so quickly that we become thoughtless? Or were we clairvoyant and knew ahead of time that the need for furniture of any kind would disappear? (Whatever you place there in front of you sits established in the air.) The ~ John Cage

Elijah's question was not answered, but his prayer was. Which would you prefer, an answer to your question or an answer to your prayer? I am sure that the widow did not particularly want her question answered; she wanted her son back, and that is what she got. Had Elijah waited for his question to be answered he would have never prayed. I have had countless people say to me, "When God explains to me why He allows suffering I will believe in Him." The result in that case will be that you will never know the answer to that question here on earth. So are you going to lose your soul and be eternally lost? Or will you pray the prayer, "God be merciful to me a sinner," without your questions being answered? ~ R.T. Kendall

-I am being killed by what keeps me from dying.
And next the sea became very small no bigger than a bathtub. Rolling in pain crashed over and over again onto the edges of the world. Then a divinity fished her out. ~ Helene Cixous

The court, as now constituted, would be meaningless without the jail which gives it its power. But if there is anything I have learned by being in jail, it is that prisons are wrong, simply and unqualifiedly wrong. ~ Barbara Deming

The thing about being black and having a different accent, in the beginning, is that it makes you foreign. ~ C. C. H. Pounder