Ghosts Of The Past Quotes

Try listening to yourself sometime, alone in a transient room in a strange town. The worst is when you draw a blank, and the ash-blonde ghosts of the past carry on long twittering long-distance calls with your inner ear, and there's no way to hang up. ~ Ross Macdonald

There were ghosts in the wind, whispers from the snow or the invisible meltwater flowing beneath. ~ Rich Shapero

We call them survivors, but once the vampires get you, the person you were dies, like any traumatized part of you never leaves that room, that car, that moment, and you walk forward a ghost of your former self. You rebuild yourself over the years, but the person you were isn't the person you become. The great bad thing happens, and you become a ghost in your own life, and then you become flesh and blood and remake your life, but the ghosts of what happened don't go away completely. They wait for you in low moments, and then they wail at you, shaking their chains in your face and trying to strangle you with them. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

Nico di Angelo has warned them: the House of Hades would stir their worst memories, make them see things and hear things from the past Their ghosts would become restless. ~ Rick Riordan

I cry as the laughter inside me drowns
and descends
into the water
with the ghosts of our union. ~ A.P. Sweet

How can I go, meeting and exorcising my own ghosts here! I've made some new ones now. ~ Sylvia Plath

Love needs to be nurtured and fed to survive; and our suffering also survives because we enable and feed it. We ruminate on suffering, regret, and sorrow. We chew on them, swallow them, bring them back up, and eat them again and again. If we're feeding our suffering while we're walking, working, eating, or talking, we are making ourselves victims of the ghosts of the past, of the future, or our worries in the present. We're not living our lives. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Because most people live either in the past or in the future, it is not correct to say that the current world population is 7.6 billion! World is full of ghosts because if your mind is not in the present time, your turn into a ghost, you become just an image! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Nothing like being woken up after only a few hours of sleep by workmen wanting to come into your sanctuary to check water lines to put life into perspective. Wine glasses, dishes, yesterday's ghosts, and a fucking mess everywhere. It's not all about me, is it? Life moves around out there and sometimes it wants to come in and mess with me when all I want to do is turn over and hide. I am a fragile being, sometimes it takes almost nothing to knock me off my feet and make me tired of living. Sometimes I am so tired that everything is a gargantuan effort. But I'm strong, I always hang on and hold on. My emotions run from being elated and looking up to the sky and seeing all the infinite possibilities, to looking straight into the eyes of Hades. But you know me, I always come through with all my scars, all the love I carry in my heart, and my crooked tiara. Every single diamond in that tiara reflects all the light within me and within you. Indestructible ~ Riitta Klint

Chasing ghosts while pursued by daemons... ~ Gail Carriger

I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts ... it is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us. ~ Henrik Ibsen

When I enter a library, when I enter the world of books, I feel the ghosts of the past on my shoulders urging me to speech. I hear Patrick Henry cry to the Burgsses, 'Is Life so dear, or Peace so sweet, to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?' I hear Sojourner Truth tell me that the hand that rocks the cradle can also rock the boat, and William Lloyd Garrison say, 'I am in earnest, I will not be silenced.' ~ Sara Paretsky

In Haven, old houses didn't settle. They carried a life of their own, and Blackwater farm was no exception. This was a house that would never be a home. The best they could hope for would be to co-exist with the ghosts of the past.
- The Silent Twin ~ Caroline Mitchell

If you don't believe in ghosts, why you wake up from nightmares screaming out the names of your dead friends? ~ Peter Fryer

We are ghosts of the people we used to be.
-Dickensian, TV Series (2015– ), s01e17 ~ Sarah Phelps

Ghosts of the past still clutch at you in the present ~ Joanne Greenberg

Everyone has ghosts that follow them throughout their lives. Ghosts of the past they wish they'd left behind, ghosts of love they once turned down, ghosts of regret and ghosts of loss. Ghosts of guilt. We all have them. I do. ~ Karina Halle

If you lack the humility to go back and tie up the loose ends in your past, then be prepared to forever be haunted by her ghosts, all of whom will come into your present and your future - staining everything and everyone with their leftover emotional and mental garbage. Humility is the master key that can get you out of all your cages; why do you choose your ego and stay in your prisons? ~ C. JoyBell C.

Understanding what it means to die, to sever oneself of the foolish hope for immortality, is what allows human beings the capability to appreciate simple pleasures and endure whatever hardships living a full life requires. Eternity is beautiful whereas time is unredeemable and problematic. Our faith, our hopes, and our love exist only in points of time. We discover eternity by avoiding the snares of prejudice and mental delusion, using the memory of whole civilizations to understand the past, and employing human consciousness to transcend fluctuations in time. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

You should not dwell too much on the mistakes, faults, and failures of the past. Be done with shame and remorse and contempt for yourself. With God's help, develop a new self-respect. Unless you respect yourself, others will not respect you. You ran a race, you stumbled and fell, you have risen again, and now you press on toward the goal of a better life. Do not stay to examine the spot where you fell, only feel sorry for the delay, the shortsightedness that prevented you from seeing the real goal sooner. ~ Anonymous

I've finally come to fully understand that you can't fix another person. You can't fix the past. You can only change your way of reacting to it. ~ Lisa Wingate

Staying in the past does not help, my friend. Everything passes you by while you're trying to relive that one little slice of golden apple that you had. ~ Ken Dereste Dorcely

The cosmos seems oblivious to time. It only matters to us. Consciousness is time-constituting. We build time up out of instantaneous impressions that flow in through our sensory organs at each moment. Then they recede into the past. What is this thing we call the past? It is a system of records encoded in our nerve tissue - records that tell a consistent story. ~ Neal Stephenson

With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge - we'll make it a thing of the past. ~ Aaron Swartz

Across the board ... Not junkies or freaks, but people who were just as comfortable with drugs like weed, booze, or coke as we are - and we're not weird, are we? Hell no, we're just overworked professionals who need to relax now and then, have a bit of the whoop and the giggle, right? ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Learn from the past, be thankful for the past, forgive the mistakes of the past, and let it go. ~ Debasish Mridha

1987: "We cannot assume that young people today know things that were known in the past by almost every literate person in the culture." Hirsch has argued that students are being sent out into the world without the basic level of cultural literacy that is necessary to be a good citizen (what does it say that two thirds of American seventeen-year-olds can't even tell you within fifty years when the Civil War occurred?), and what's needed is a kind of educational counterreformation that reemphasizes hard facts. ~ Joshua Foer

Walking under Dusk, Moonlit leaf shadows were cast on my skin from the trees above, every step I took was taking a step deeper into magic. Silent whispers of mystical mouthes pulling me in deeper. Then the lights from inside the house turned on. A few seconds later, the fence lights went on. Just like that, the leafy ghosts on my skin ran away and the faery voices ran home. It seems like the creations of man kill magic in so many ways - even the light bulb does this! Oh to be a race of people designing magical things, if someone could capture pieces of Moonlight and place it in a jar; or other things like that, then we could stop killing the magic and be filled with it instead. Or maybe we are already always filled with it. It's the bringing out that we have trouble with. Stop being a doorknob, darling! Be magical, instead! ~ C. JoyBell C.

Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that "I" and all other "things" now present will vanish, until this knowledge compels you to release them - to know it now as surely as if you had just fallen off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Indeed you were kicked off the edge of a precipice when you were born, and it's no help to cling to the rocks falling with you. If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise; you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are. ~ Alan W. Watts

The Halifax area has long played a major role in Canada's military operations, being the port of departure for convoys, naval task forces and army units over the past 100 years or so. ~ Alex Morrison

This witch's brew of vulnerability and fear and hope makes dawn the time when we can best hear whatever it is our ghosts are trying to tell us. But ~ Barbara Nickless

The forms of the short, written poem as they have been developed in English over the past few centuries can be usefully seen as compressed, truncated, or fragmented imitations of other verbal forms, especially the play, story, public oration, and personal essay. ~ Robert Scholes

To Hate Or To Hate Not? For It Is Best Not To Hate ... For Hate Has Such A Destructive Past! ~ Timothy Pina

... We need to remember that the most significant events in the last 2,000 years were not the marvels of science, technology, and travel. They were the Savior's Atonement and the restoration of the gospel, with the priesthood keys and authority. These two singular events will continue to be of transcendent importance to mankind as we move forward in time. The past, present, and future pivot on these marvelous divine interventions. ~ James E. Faust

People have suggested that perhaps we are too affluent to be telling this story, which is amazing to me because then I wonder what story I am allowed to tell. Having been working with the homeless for the past years, I noticed lots of things about them, but one thing I really noticed was that they were probably too busy just getting though the day to make a film about themselves. ~ Paul Bettany

The history of the two halves of post-war Europe cannot be told in isolation from one another. The legacy of the Second World War - and the pre-war decades and the war before that - forced upon the governments and peoples of east and west Europe alike some hard choices about how best to order their affairs so as to avoid any return to the past. One option - to pursue the radical agenda of the popular front movements of the 1930s - was initially very popular in both parts of Europe (a reminder that 1945 was never quite the fresh start that it sometimes appears). In eastern Europe some sort of radical transformation was unavoidable. There could be no possibility of returning to the discredited past. What, then, would replace it? Communism may have been the wrong solution, but the dilemma to which it was responding was real enough.
In the West the prospect of radical change was smoothed away, not least thanks to American aid (and pressure). The appeal of the popular-front agenda - and of Communism - faded: both were prescriptions for hard times and in the West, at least after 1952, the times were no longer so hard. And so, in the decades that followed, the uncertainties of the immediate post-war years were forgotten. But the possibility that things might take a different turn - indeed, the likelihood that they would take a different turn - had seemed very real in 1945; it was to head off a return of the old demons (unemployment, Fascism, German militarism, war, revolution) ~ Tony Judt

What, then, can Shakespearean tragedy, on this brief view, tell us about human time in an eternal world? It offers imagery of crisis, of futures equivocally offered, by prediction and by action, as actualities; as a confrontation of human time with other orders, and the disastrous attempt to impose limited designs upon the time of the world. What emerges from Hamlet is--after much futile, illusory action--the need of patience and readiness. The 'bloody period' of Othello is the end of a life ruined by unseasonable curiosity. The millennial ending of Macbeth, the broken apocalypse of Lear, are false endings, human periods in an eternal world. They are researches into death in an age too late for apocalypse, too critical for prophecy; an age more aware that its fictions are themselves models of the human design on the world. But it was still an age which felt the human need for ends consonant with the past, the kind of end Othello tries to achieve by his final speech; complete, concordant. As usual, Shakespeare allows him his tock; but he will not pretend that the clock does not go forward. The human perpetuity which Spenser set against our imagery of the end is represented here also by the kingly announcements of Malcolm, the election of Fortinbras, the bleak resolution of Edgar.

In apocalypse there are two orders of time, and the earthly runs to a stop; the cry of woe to the inhabitants of the earth means the end of their time; henceforth 'time shall be no more.' I ~ Frank Kermode

I'm not the only person who carries a lot of assumptions when I read the Bible, and it can be tough to entertain the idea that the Word of God has different perspectives in it. Biblical apologists spend all their time weaving these different viewpoints into a single frame, in an effort that often looks like squids playing Twister: fascinating, appalling, and hard to follow. We've seen what this approach to history can sow: a destructive oversimplification of the Church's past.
Americans treat their national narrative in much this way, too. We simplistically teach a single story in our history classrooms, of brave rebels who left cultures of tyranny and heroically crossed the Atlantic to found a nation built on freedom and justice. When we speak of our national sins, such as the genocide committed on Nation Americans or the brutal, longterm economic extraction of wealth from black bodies via slavery and segregation, we seem to dismiss these troubling matters as things that happened in the remote past but that have been resolved today. ~ Mike McHargue

Nothing Exists outside the NOW
Nothing ever happened in the past - It happened in the Now.
Nothing will ever happen in the future - It will happen in the Now.
When you think of the past, it is stored in the mind as a former now, and when you think about the past, when do you do it? - You do it now!
When the future comes - it comes in the now, and when you think about the future, when do you do it? - You do it now!
The past and the future have no realities of their own. Their realities are "borrowed" from the now. ~ Robert Anthony

It cannot be denied that the most successful practitioners of
the art of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to
synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat
simultaneously in every normal human system so that when eleven strikes,
all the rest chime in unison, and the present is neither a violent
disruption nor completely forgotten in the past. Of them we can justly
say that they live precisely the sixty-eight or seventy-two years
allotted them on the tombstone. Of the rest some we know to be dead
though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through
the forms of life; others are hundreds of years old though they call
themselves thirty-six. The true length of a person's life, whatever the
"Dictionary of National Biography" may say, is always a matter of
dispute. ~ Virginia Woolf

A highly developed country of the past, in an advanced state of decay). ~ Shashi Tharoor

Who the hell is Warren Ellis again?"
Hardison gaped at the man. "Only one of the greatest comics writers in the past twenty years. Might as well ask who Alan Moore is, or Frank Miller, or Mark Waid, or Brian Michael Bendis, or Marv Wolfman, or Geoff Johns."

Eliot gave Hardison a blank look as they wove their way through the hall. Parker took the lead, toting a printed sign with her. Eliot and Hardison trailed in her wake. They made a point of striding right past Patronus's booth. They didn't turn to see if he noticed them.

"No one?" Hardison said. "Nothing? Not even Kurt Busiek? Neil Gaiman?"

"I have a life. I do things, active things. I date women."
"Stan Lee?"

Eliot gave Hardison that one with a wag of his head. "Who hasn't heard of Stan Lee?"

"All right," Hardison said with satisfaction. "You had me worried there, man. ~ Matt Forbeck

Be strong! ... You talk of ghosts and devils. We are the living devils. The sign of life is strength and growth. The sign of death is weakness. Whatever is weak, avoid! It is death. If it is strength, go down into hell and get hold of it! There is salvation only for the brave. "None but the brave deserves the fair." None but the bravest deserves salvation. ~ Swami Vivekananda

If a friend is the one who summons us to our best, then is not Jesus Christ our best friend, and should we not think of the Communion as one of His chief appeals to us to be our best? The Lord's Supper looks not back to our past with a critical eye, but to our future, with a hopeful one. The Master appeals from what we have been to what we may be. He bids us come, not because we are better than we have been, but because He wants us to be. To stay away because our hearts are cold is to refuse to go to the fire till we are warm. ~ Maltbie Davenport Babcock

I was treating the past as if it could be mined for clues, for reasons.
But the past resists that.
It holds too much evidence of too many things. ~ David Levithan

Our inner experience is that which we think, feel, remember, perceive, sense, decide, plan and predict. These experiences are actually mental actions, or mental activity (Van der Hart et al., 2006). Mental activity, in which we engage all the time, may or may not be accompanied by behavioral actions. It is essential that you become aware of, learn to tolerate and regulate, and even change major mental actions that affect your current life, such as negative beliefs, and feelings or reactions to the past the interfere with the present. However, it is impossible to change inner experiences if you are avoiding them because you are afraid, ashamed or disgusted by them. Serious avoidance of you inner experiences is called experiential avoidance (Hayes, Wilson, Gifford, & Follettte, 1996), or the phobia of inner experience (Steele, Van der Hart, & Nijenhuis, 2005; Van der Hart et al., 2006). ~ Suzette Boon

Now when he closes his eyes he can really look at himself. He no longer sees a mask. He sees without seeing, to be exact. Vision without sight, a fluid grasp of intangibles: the merging of sight and sound: the heart of the web. Here stream the different personalities which evade the crude contact of the senses; here the overtones of recognition discreetly lap against one another in bright, vibrant harmonies. There is no language employed, no outlines delineated. When a ship founders, it settles slowly; the spars, the masts, the rigging float away. On the ocean floor of death the bleeding hull bedecks itself with jewels; remorselessly the anatomic life begins. What was ship becomes the nameless indestructible. Like ships, men founder time and again. Only memory saves them from complete dispersion. Poets drop their stitches in the loom, straws for drowning men to grasp as they sink into extinction. Ghosts climb back on watery stairs, make imaginary ascents, vertiginous drops, memorize numbers, dates, events, in passing from gas to liquid and back again. There is no brain capable of registering the changing changes. Nothing happens in the brain, except the gradual rust and detrition of the cells. But in the minds, worlds unclassified, undenominated, unassimilated, form, break, unite, dissolve and harmonize ceaselessly. In the mind-world ideas are the indestructible elements which form the jewelled constellations of the interior life. We move within their orbits, freely if we fol ~ Henry Miller

Our life at present on the blessed soil of our country is a triumph over the pains of the past and the harshness of its conditions. ~ Sheikh Zayed Al Nahyan

There are those who ask what authority, what theological qualification, the Council intended to give to its teachings, knowing that it avoided issuing solemn dogmatic definitions backed by the Church's infallible teaching authority. The answer is known by those who remember the conciliar declaration of March 6, 1964, repeated on November 16, 1964. In view of the pastoral nature of the Council, it avoided proclaiming in an extraordinary manner any dogmata carrying the mark of infallibility. ~ Pope Paul VI

The first pair Opal and Amber are,
Agate sings in B flat, the wolf avatar,
A duet-solutio! - with Aquamarine.
Mighty Emerald next, with the lovely Citrine.
Number Eight is digestio, her stand is Jade fine.
E major's the key of the Black Tourmaline,
Sapphire sings in F major, and bright is her sheen.
Then almost at once comes Diamond alone,
Whose sign of the lion as Leo is known.
Projectio! Time flows on, both present and past.
Ruby red is the first and is also the last. ~ Kerstin Gier

There is a moment that has happened over and over again, in every place children have ever slept, on every dark night for the past ten thousand years, that almost everyone who was once a child will forever remember. It happens when you are being tucked into bed, on a dark and frightened night when the sounds of the nighttime outside are drowned out only by the far more frightening sounds in your head. You have already gone to bed, have tried to go to bed, but because of whatever sounds you hear in your head you have failed to go to bed, and someone much older than you, someone so old that you cannot even imagine yourself becoming that old, has come to sit beside you and make sure you fall asleep. But the moment that everyone who was once a child will remember is not the story the unfathomably old person tells you, or the lullaby he sings for you, but rather the moment right after the story or song has ended. You are lying there with your eyes closed, not sleeping just yet but noticing that the sounds inside your head seem to have vanished, and you know, through closed eyes, that the person beside you thinks that you are asleep and is simply watching you. In that fraction of an instant between when that person stops singing and when that person decides to rise from the bed and disappear -- a tiny rehearsal, though you do not know it yet, of what will eventually happen for good -- time holds still, and you can feel, through closed eyes, how that person, watching your still, sma ~ Dara Horn

We wait and think and doubt and hate. How does it make you feel? The overwhelming feeling is rage. We hate ourself for being unable to be other than what we are. Unable to be better. We feel rage. The feelings must be followed. It doesn't matter whether you're an ideologue or a sensualist, you follow the stimuli thinking that they're your signposts to the promised land. But they are nothing of the kind. What they are is rocks to navigate the past, each on your brush against, ripping you a little more open and they are always more on the horizon. But you can't face up to the that, so you force yourself to believe the bullshit of those you instinctively know are liars and you repeat those lies to yourself and to others, hoping that by repeating them often and fervently enough you'll attain the godlike status we accord those who tell the lies most frequently and most passionately. But you never do, and even if you could, you wouldn't value it, you'd realise that nobody believes in heroes any more. We know that they only want to sell us something we don't really want and keep from us what we really do need. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe we're getting in touch with our condition at last. It's horrible how we always die alone, but no worse than living alone. ~ Irvine Welsh

But another part of me wanted him to sense that there was no point trying to catch up now - we'd traveled and been through too much without each other for there to be any common ground between us. Perhaps I wanted him to feel the sting of loss, and grieve. But in the end, and by way of compromise, perhaps, I decided that the easiest way was to show I'd forgotten none of it. I made a motion to take him to the empty lot that remained as scorched and fallow as when I'd shown it to him two decades before. I had barely finished my offer - 'Been there, done that,' he replied. It was his way of telling me he hadn't forgotten either. 'Maybe you'd prefer to make a quick stop at the bank.' He burst out laughing. 'I'll bet you they never closed my account.' 'If we have time, and if you care to, I'll take you to the belfry. I know you've never been up there.'

'To-die-for?'

I smiled back. He remembered our name for it. ~ Andre Aciman

I envy those Hindus and Buddhists who have in their religion philosophy and ancestor worship which build in the believer a continuity with the past, and that most important ingredient in the building of a nation - memory. ~ F. Sionil Jose

Eight Bells: Robert J. Kane '55D died June 3, 2017, in Palm Harbor, Florida. He came to MMA by way of Boston College. Bob or "Killer," as he was affectionately known, was an independent and eccentric soul, enjoying the freedom of life. After a career at sea as an Officer in the U.S. Navy and in the Merchant Marine he retired to an adventurous single life living with his two dogs in a mobile home, which had originally been a "Yellow School Bus." He loved watching the races at Daytona, Florida, telling stories about his interesting deeds about flying groceries to exotic Caribbean Islands, and misdeeds with mysterious ladies he had known. For years he spent his summers touring Canada and his winters appreciating the more temperate weather at Fort De Soto in St. Petersburg, Florida…. Enjoying life in the shadow of the Sunshine Bridge, Bob had an artistic flare, a positive attitude and a quick sense of humor. Not having a family, few people were aware that he became crippled by a hip replacement operation gone bad at the Bay Pines VA Hospital. His condition became so bad that he could hardly get around, but he remained in good spirits until he suffered a totally debilitating stroke. For the past 6 years Bob spent his time at various Florida Assisted Living Facilities, Nursing Homes and Palliative Care Hospitals. His end came when he finally wound up as a terminal patient at the Hospice Facility in Palm Harbor, Florida. Bob was 86 years old when he passed. He will be missed…. ~ Hank Bracker

The birch trees loom ahead like a brotherhood of ghosts. ~ Lisa Ann Sandell

We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective. ~ Umberto Eco

In the past people would say, "I can only do this world-class snowboarding if I have a helicopter." Actually, if you're committed to it, willing to put a bunch of energy into it, then you can do it under your own power. ~ Jeremy Jones

Children are often envied for their supposed imaginations, but the truth is that adults imagine things far more than children do. Most adults wander the world deliberately blind, living only inside their heads, in their fantasies, in their memories and worries, oblivious to the present, only aware of the past or future. ~ Dara Horn

That's when I realized that part of me would probably always be lost in the past. That just seemed to be my personality: I was the one who couldn't stand change. ~ Beth Harbison

Is it ghosts that truly haunt us, or the memory of our own mistakes that we wish we could undo? ~ Laura Lam