Leave The Past Behind Quotes

Do you think we can ever leave the past behind?' he said.
'I don't know. I hope so. ~ Paula McLain

To move foward, you have to leave the past behind ~ Susannah Cahalan

I feel like I've started a new chapter in my life, and I need to leave the past behind. ~ Jennifer Capriati

The warrior woman is filled with the courage, confidence, and inner strength to leave the past behind. She knows that there is no way to express herself fully when she is still carrying burdens that need to be released. ~ Debbie Ford

Can we leave the past behind us?"

Could they? The question was everything.

"That's an excellent place for the past," said Suheyla. "If you don't leave it there, it clutters everything up and you just keep tripping over it. ~ Laini Taylor

The past did affect the present and the future, in ways you could see and a million ones you couldn't. Time wasn't a thing you could divide easily; there was no defined middle or beginning or end. I could pretend to leave the past behind, but it would not leave me. ~ Sarah Dessen

Frequently we do not leave the past behind. We clasp on to it. We dissect it, and let fears for the future, tempered by the past, unconsciously prevent us from taking up the task eternal. ~ Ray Simpson

The easiest way to leave the past behind is to remember that love does not live in the past, only memories - love lives in the present. ~ Bryant McGill

How could I touch you with these hands?" he asked, his tone shredded with anguish. "How could you stand to let me? God, if you knew all the things I've done-"
"I love your hands," she murmured.
"I'm not good enough for you. But no one is. And most men, good or bad, have limits to what they would do, even for someone they love. I have none. No God, no moral code, no faith in anything. Except you. You're my religion. I would do anything you asked. I would fight, steal, kill for you. I would-"
"Shhh. Hush. My goodness." She sounded breathless. "There's no need to break all the commandments, Kev."
"You don't understand," he said, drawing back to look at her. "If you believed anything I've told you-"
"I do understand." Her face was like an angel's, soft and compassionate. "And I believe what you've said... but I don't agree at all with the conclusions you seem to have drawn." Her hands lifted, molding against his lean cheeks. "You are a good man, a loving one. The rom baro tried to kill all that inside you, but he couldn't succeed. Because of your strength. Because of your heart."
She eased back onto the bed and drew him down to her. "Be at ease, Kev," she whispered. "Your uncle was an evil man, but what he did must be buried with him. 'Let the dead bury the dead'- do you know what that means?"
He shook his head.
"To leave the past behind and look only to the journey ahead. Only then can you find a new way. A new life. It's a Christian sayi ~ Lisa Kleypas

How you do you leave the past behind when it keeps finding ways to get to your heart?
It reaches way down deep and tears you up till you're torn apart. ~ Jonathan Larson

It would be the simplest thing to say, my homeland is where I was born. But when you returned, you found nothing. What does that mean? It would be the simplest thing to say, my homeland is where I will die. But you could die anywhere, or on the border between two places. What does that mean? After a while the question will become harder. Why did you leave? Why did you leave? For twenty years you have been asking, why did they leave? Leaving is not a negation of the homeland, but it does turn the problem into a question. Do not write a history now. When you do that, you leave the past behind, and what is required is to call the past to account. Do not write a history except that of your wounds. Do not write a history except that of your exile. You are here - here, where you were born. And where longing will lead you to death. So, what is homeland? ~ Mahmoud Darwish

It is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday. ~ William H Gass

We cannot go back in time and change the past, but we can repent. The Savior can wipe away our tears of regret and remove the burden of our sins. His Atonement allows us to leave the past behind and move forward with clean hands, a pure heart, and a determination to do better and especially to become better. ~ Dieter F. Uchtdorf

Leave the past behind you so the future can find you ~ Brittainy C. Cherry

To the sky, I rise / Spread my wings, and fly / I leave the past behind / And say goodbye to the scared child inside / I sing for freedom, and for love / I look at my reflection / Embrace the woman I've become / The unbreakable lotus in me / I now set free ~ Christina Aguilera

(M)uch as we might imagine we can leave the past behind, it has a nasty way of pressing its hoary old face against the window just as we were sitting down to the feast. ~ Valerie Martin

I saw this was the way of the future, to leave the past behind as if it were a dream. ~ Alice Hoffman

He lowered his voice and leaned in so his breath caressed her face. "I'll give you everything I am. I swear it. If you trust me you'll never have any reason to regret it. Start a life with me, Mary. Let's leave the past behind and create a new future together." Fingers twined in the wet hair at her nape so that she had to tilt her chin to maintain eye contact. "Let me love you, angel eyes. ~ Aline Hunter

the ultimate determinant of my life has got nothing to do with neither my past nor my present but my aspirations, my tenacity to dare and to do; to leave a great and an indelible positive footprints on earth ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anynymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond. ~ Cormac McCarthy

To what a degree the same past can leave different marks - and especially admit of different interpretations. ~ Andre Gide

I don't know. I've come to tell you what I did.' Yes, that was the reason of his visit. It was the closing of a book that would never be read again, and better close such a book than leave it lying about to get dirtied. The volume of their past must be restored to its shelf, and here, here was the place, amid darkness and perishing flowers. He owed it to Alec also. He could suffer no mixing of the old with the new. All compromise was perilous, because furtive, and, having finished his confession, he must disappear from the world that had brought him up. ~ E. M. Forster

Besides, whoever keeps the future in front of him and the past at his back is doing something else that's hard to imagine. For the image implies that events somehow already exist in the future, reach the present at a determined moment, and finally come to rest in the past. But nothing exists in the future; it is empty; one might die at any minute. Therefore such a person has his face toward the void, whereas it is the past behind him that is visible, stored in the memory. ~ Harry Mulisch

In the past year I've gotten used to being cut down to size whenever I start acting too high and mighty. If you didn't keep me in line,I'd be damn well unmanageable. As it is, you're going to have a lot of work to do once they leave. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Leave an old flame in the past. It'll just get worse if you rekindle it. ~ Yeong-hun Kim

A gang of teenage boys had gathered on the steps of the Odeon. Boys Collin knew, from the fourth and fifth year, boys with braying laughs and sudden, falsetto giggles, boys who stood on street corners and watched girls walk past, who punched each other with painful tenderness, who cultivated small moustaches that broke down, when shaved, into crusts of acne thicker than the moustaches had ever been, who lit cigarettes behind cupped hands, narrowing their eyes in pretended indifference to the smoke. ~ Pat Barker

Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable. ~ Zadie Smith

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea! ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Clinging to the past is like walking backward down a long road. As long as our backs are turned on what lies ahead, and our eyes are focused on what lies behind, we cannot take full notice of all God has planned for us. ~ Ellen Senechal

It is quite natural to think of the self as something concrete, but it is, in fact, nothing of the sort. Rather, it is an abstract product of our minds, a convenient concept or schema that enables us to relate our present self with our past, future, and conditional selves, and thereby to create an illusion of coherence and continuity from a big jumble of disparate experiences. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue that the self is nothing but the sum total of our ego defences, and that it is therefore tantamount to one gigantic ego defence, namely, the ego itself. The self is like a cracked mask that is in constant need of being pieced together. But behind the mask there is nobody at home. ~ Neel Burton

Every time something really bad happens, people cry out for safety, and the government answers by taking rights away from good people. We have no proof that the bad, stupid crazy people who have planted bombs in the past few years used the phone much for their stupid bad crimes, let alone logged on the Internet. Yet when those kind of bad things happen nowadays, the government tries to do bad things to phones and the Net. The phones and the Internet are just good smart things, and the government should leave them alone. You have to watch the government all the time on everything. Thomas Jefferson didn't say that, but he said something very close to that. ~ Penn Jillette

People come into our lives and then they go out again. The entropy law, as applied to human relations. Sometimes in their passing, though, they register an unimagined and far-reaching influence, as I suspect Hughes Rudd did upon me. There is no scientific way to discern such effects, but memory believes before knowing remembers. And the past lives coiled within the present, beyond sight, beyond revocation, lifting us up or weighting us down, sealed away
almost completely
behind walls of pearl. ~ David Quammen

What sort of future is coming up from behind I don't really know. But the past, spread out ahead, dominates everything in sight. ~ Robert Prisig

Leave the past in the past, tomorrows not promised and Todays just a gift
i guess thats why its the present ~ Joe Budden

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. ~ David Brin

When we can't understand the science behind something in this world, we make up mythological entities that we can relate to. We personify the forces of nature that mystify us, using our boundless imaginations to comfort us and make us feel like we have some control over these things that are much bigger than we are. ~ Chelsie Shakespeare

In the TIME ORIENTATION metaphor, an observer is located at the present, with the past behind him and the future in front, as in That's all behind us, We're looking ahead, and She has a great future in front of her. Then a metaphorical motion can be added to the scene in one of two ways. In the MOVING TIME metaphor, time is a parade that sweeps past a stationary observer: The time will come when typewriters are obsolete; The time for action has arrived; The deadline is approaching; The summer is flying by. But we also find a MOVING OBSERVER metaphor, in which the landscape of time is stationary and the observer proceeds through it: There's trouble down the road; We're coming up on Christmas; She left at nine o' clock; We passed the deadline; We're halfway through the semester. ~ Steven Pinker

Never tripping off the past, I would rather never mind 'em/'Cause only fools trip over something that be behind 'em ~ Fabolous

She seated herself on a dark ottoman with the brown books behind her, looking in her plain dress of some thin woollen-white material, without a single ornament on her besides her wedding-ring, as if she were under a vow to be different from all other women; and Will sat down opposite her at two yards' distance, the light falling on his bright curls and delicate but rather petulant profile, with its defiant curves of lip and chin. Each looked at the other as if they had been two flowers which had opened then and there. Dorothea for the moment forgot her husband's mysterious irritation against Will: it seemed fresh water at her thirsty lips to speak without fear to the one person whom she had found receptive; for in looking backward through sadness she exaggerated a past solace. ~ George Eliot

Always there is the one choice to be made: which road to take? which duty to accept? which item, amidst a store's displays, to purchase as our own? The paths of the past parts of our lives are strewn with things not chosen. One believes, nay, one is taught, that choice provides fulfillment of desire. In truth, however, relinquishment and loss enter in to the bargain every single time. Loss looks over the shoulders of fair choice. For every thing one chooses, some thing is left behind. ~ Joan W. Blos

A moth was a caterpillar, once, but it no longer is a caterpillar. It cannot break itself back down, cannot metamorphose in reverse. To try to eat leaves again would mean starvation. Crawling back into the husk would provide no shelter. It is a paradox -- the impossibility of reclaiming that which lies behind, housed within a form comprised entirely of the repurposed pieces of that same past. We exist where we begin, yet to remain there is death... I could not have predicted each version of me that I shifted into, but through my history, one constant has always remained true: change itself... I did not know who she was, the one waiting for me to start moving toward her. I was curious about her, all the same. I was eager to meet her. ~ Becky Chambers

My feelings for Maxx were causing me to make decisions I never would have made in the past. I was forgetting about everything that had mattered to me, potentially throwing it all away to save a boy I was pretty sure didn't want to be saved.
Love made us stupid.
Love made us blind.
Love could incapacitate us and leave us powerless.
And love could also make everything better.
I couldn't let myself think anything less. ~ A Meredith Walters

You want to ignore it and leave things in the past. But you're always going to be scared that I can't love you through anything if you don't give me the chance to prove that I will. ~ Laurelin Paige

Can you make it past me, thief-catcher?" Mat called, careful not to take his eyes off the man waiting for him with blade poised to strike. Sandar had insisted irritably on "thief-catcher," not "thief-taker," though Mat could not see any difference.
"I cannot," Sandar called from behind him. "If you move to let me by, you will lose room to swing that oar you call a staff, and he will spit you like a grunt."
Like a what? "Well, think of something, Tairen. This ragamuffin is grating my nerves."
The man in the gold-striped coat sneered. "You will be honored to die on the blade of the High Lord Darlin, peasant, if I allow it so." It was the first time he had deigned to speak. "Instead, I think I will have the pair of you hung by the heels, and watch while the skin is stripped from your bodies - "
"I do not think I'd like that," Mat said. ~ Robert Jordan

Sometimes driven aground by the photon storms, by the swirling of the galaxies, clockwise and counterclockwise, ticking with light down the dark sea-corridors lined with our silver sails, our demon-haunted sails, our hundred-league masts as fine as threads, as fine as silver needles sewing the threads of starlight, embroidering the stars on black velvet, wet with the winds of Time that go racing by. The bone in her teeth! The spume, the flying spume of Time, cast up on these beaches where old sailors can no longer keep their bones from the restless, the unwearied universe. Where has she gone? My lady, the mate of my soul? Gone across the running tides of Aquarius, of Pisces, of Aries. Gone. Gone in her little boat, her nipples pressed against the black velvet lid, gone, sailing away forever from the star-washed shores, the dry shoals of the habitable worlds. She is her own ship, she is the figurehead of her own ship, and the captain. Bosun, Bosun, put out the launch! Sailmaker, make a sail! She has left us behind. We have left her behind. She is in the past we never knew and the future we will not see. Put out more sail, Captain for the universe is leaving us behind… ~ Gene Wolfe

But in case you can't find her let me draw you a map with some crayons, you go past leave us the fuck alone, and turn right at fuck off, and oh look you're in slut country. ~ J.L. Beck

Leave the Irreparable Past in His hands, and step out into the Irresistible Future with Him. ~ Oswald Chambers

From this moment forward ... I stop the blame game and excuses. I am responsible for my life and for where I am today. I cannot blame the people and circumstances in my past, and I refuse to hide behind my past mistakes. ~ Lance Wubbels

Here i sit all broken hearted
Came to sleep that's when it started.
Broken dreams from behind
Fall beneath me so unkind.

Sorrow swallows sucks and chews,
All the dreams I had to lose.
Thinking of all the lies i was told
Makes me feel hollow and cold.

Behind my smile I force on my face
Is a broken man not having a place.
I wonder aimless through the night
Depression is the demon I fight.

They all ask me how I'm doing
Its hard to stop the pain pursuing.
I choke pain down and grin so wide
Only to kill the fear inside.

Sleep deprived awake and tired
this curse is a trap all ready wired.
Just sleep more they all say
I would if the past would go away.

It's better now to be alone
Than lied and cheated to the bone.
I hate the life I've lived thus far
And gladly wear this awful scar.

It has gotten easier that is no lie,
I no longer wish that I would die.
I dream of days when I feel this pain
and deal with it without strain.

I do not know where I will go
only god will ever know.
I pray for all the promises forgotten,
the empty chords that fell all rotten.

I aim to search look and seek
This life i want simple and meek.
It makes the past so very grey
The thoughts of future day

The night will fade and dissolve
I march on with no resolve
Ahead i walk ~ Private

We're all livin' in the past ... we're really always eighty milliseconds behind life happenin' ... that's how long it takes our brains to comprehend what's already taken place right in front of our eyes. So, I guess I'm not alone. Everyone's livin' in the past, to some extent. I've just become a prisoner of mine ... I've become a prisoner - willingly. But then I guess you really can't be called a prisoner if you willingly carry the chains. ~ Laura Miller

In a slow, pleasant voice, Prince Alaerec asked mild questions--weather, travel, Bran's day and how he'd filled it. I stayed silent as the three of them worked away at this limping conversation. The Renselaeus father and son were skilled enough at nothing-talk, but poor Bran stumbled over half his words, sending frequent glances at me. In the past I'd often spoken for both of us, for truth was he felt awkward with his tongue and was somewhat shy with new people, but I did not feel like speaking until I'd sorted my emotions out--and there was no time for that.
To bridge his own feelings, my brother gulped at the very fine wine they offered. Soon a servant came in and announced that dinner was ready, and the old Prince rose slowly, leaning heavily on a cane. His back was straight, though, as he led the way to a dining room. Bran and I fell in behind, I treading cautiously, with my skirts bunched in either hand.
Bran snickered. I looked up, saw him watching me, his face flushed. "Life, Mel, are you supposed to walk like that?" He snickered again, swallowed the rest of his third glass of wine, then added, "Looks like you got eggs in those shoes."
"I don't know how I'm supposed to walk," I mumbled, acutely aware of that bland-faced, elegantly dressed Marquis right behind us, and elbowed Bran in the side. "Stop laughing! If I drop these skirts, I'll trip over them."
"Why didn't you just ask for riding gear?"
"And a coach-and-six while I was at it? This is w ~ Sherwood Smith

...below even our most obscure physical consciousness is a subconscious being in which as in a covering and supporting soil are all manner of hidden seeds that sprout up, unaccountably to us, on our surface and into which we are constantly throwing fresh seeds that prolong our past and will influence our future,--a subconscious being, obscure, small in its motions, capriciously and almost fantastically subrational, but of an immense potency for the earth-life. Again behind our mind, our life, our conscious physical there is a larger subliminal consciousness,--there are inner mental, inner vital, inner more subtle physical reaches supported by an inmost psychic existence which is the connecting soul of all the rest; and in these hidden reaches too lie a mass of numerous pre-existent personalities which supply the material, the motive-forces, the impulsions of our developing surface existence. For in each of us here there may be one central person, but also a multitude of subordinate personalities created by the past history of its manifestation or by expressions of it on these inner planes which support its present play in this external material cosmos... ~ Sri Aurobindo

Light upon light upon light---
back and back we trace it to its Source,
radiating light and sound---a voice, an echo
guiding those who hear Love's desire
unfold the universe's story,
who come to this call
like thirsty birds to water.
Beloved, the One creates for us
models, signs, symbols, parables
everywhere we look to remind us
of our Source.
And the one behind all
understands and embraces all---
the past and future journey of every thing
from seed to star. ~ Neil Douglas-Klotz-Klotz

I could not imagine that the future I was walking toward could compare in any way to the past that I was leaving behind. ~ Nelson Mandela

In English, consciousness and unconsciousness are part of a vertical plane, so that we wake up ↑ and we fall ↓ asleep and we sink ↓ into a coma. Chinese uses the horizontal line, so that to wake is to cross a border towards consciousness → and to faint is to go back ← . Meanwhile, time itself is vertical so that last year is "the year above" ↑ and next year is "the year below" ↓. The day before yesterday is the day "in front" ↑ and the day after tomorrow is the day "behind" ↓. This means that future generations are not the generations ahead, but the ones behind. Therefore, to look into the future one must turn around... ~ Madeleine Thien

And all this culture, all this art, was simply a trick. It allowed us to pretend that human beings were noble, intelligent creatures who'd left their animal past behind them long ago and had evolved into something finer, something purer; that because they could write like angels they were angels. But this art was just a screen that hid the ugly truth -- that we were still the same creatures who had cut into the warm bellies of the animals we'd killed with sharpened stones and vented our anger on the weak with frenzied blows of a blunt club. ~ Gordon Reece