Our Pasts Quotes

That's why we have memory. And the opposite of memory - hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can built off our pasts and make future. ~ Isaac Marion

am a collection of the obsolete, a relic of the damned, of the lost and strayed. I am the waylaid pieces of history which sank out of sight in all of our pasts. ~ Frank Herbert

Gentle Reminder: 1 Don't confuse protecting your heart with being too scared to try something new with someone else, there is a difference. A lot of us have given way too much power to our pasts. Not everyone who may want a chance is going to use that chance against you negatively. Yes, some folks may fool us, trick us and even hurt us but some is not all. Don't miss out on a good thing because your past is persuading you not to pursue your future. ~ Alexandra Elle

He loves me so he hurts me
To try and make me good.
It doesn't work. I'm just too bad
And don't do what I should.

My memory has so many different sections and, like all survivors, there are so many compartments with so many triggers. I'll remember a smell which reminds me of a man which reminds me of a place which reminds me of another man who I think was with a woman who had a certain smell - and I'm back to square one. This is the case for most survivors, I believe. When we try to put together our pasts, the triggers are many and varied, the memories are disjointed - and why wouldn't they be? We were children. Even someone with an idyllic childhood who is only trying to remember the lovely things which happened to them will scratch their head and wonder who gave them that doll and was it for Christmas or their third birthday? Did they have a party when they were four or five? When did they go on a plane for the first time? You see, even happy memories are hard to piece together - so imagine how hard it is to collate all of the trauma, to pull together all of the things I've been trying to push away for so many years. ~ Laurie Matthew

He was afraid, just like I was, that in the short time we had been together, we weren't enough to make it through everything that wanted to tear us apart.
Fame.
Industry.
Ghosts from both our pasts. ~ Nicole French

We are all what our pasts have made us," Catarina said. "The accumulation of thousands of daily choices. We can change ourselves, but never erase what we've been. ~ Cassandra Clare

Our past's can either dictate who we are today, or help shape that we want to be. ~ J.S. Snow

We aren't who our pasts say we are. Damage doesn't define us. WE DEFINE OURSELVES. ~ Cynthia Eden

Of our pasts we seemed to know all we needed to know. Nothing was concealed, and though nothing was overtly revealed, all was known. In guilt and in forgiveness we counted ourselves equals, and always had. The sun himself envied us. ~ Sena Jeter Naslund

We all are bound to those around us by glue, and to our pasts, and sometimes we need to dissolve it... They say you need to pull all the pieces apart and stand back to see how they fit together. Deconstruction. But what if then they can't be put back together? ~ Amanda Green

Our pasts shape us,Sam.None of us the person he or she used to be,it's true, but what we are still contains a great proportion of what we once were.Nothing,not even suffering the worst kind of tragedy,alters us completely.At core,we are set in stone. ~ James Lovegrove

I never lied to you. (Kiara)
Of course you did –you said you could see the real us– that we weren't as bad as we claimed. But you didn't and, just like everyone else, so long as we risk our lives to protect and save you, we're okay. But the moment we have to make a choice not ours, the moment you see what our pasts have made us, you're horrified by the truth and hate us for it like we had some kind of choice in what we are. (Syn) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

My mom used to say that's why we have memory. And the opposite of memory - hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can build off our pasts and make futures. ~ Isaac Marion

we're not human any more. We've slipped out of our skins like lizards, shedding not just our pasts, but our futures. ~ Irvine Welsh

It also reminds me that true power comes not from submission or gain, but from controlling my inner demons. Because our true enemies live within ourselves and feed from the lessons we failed to learn from our pasts. ~ J.C. Reed

Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves. ~ Ted Chiang

Damien is my anchor to this world, and I am his. But if we are going to keep each other, we have to fight the shadows of
our pasts to move forward into our future. ~ J. Kenner

If we were all perfect in our pasts, then we'd have nothing to hope for in our futures ~ Jenny Oliver

What if we are being held in midnight, AK? Both of us locked in the dark of our pasts. Together. And maybe we must endure the darkness for a while."
I swallowed, eyes fixed on hers.
"But then, one day will come the sunrise. The darkness will need, and the sunlight will pour in. Sunrise, AK. Just imagine." She smiled and nearly broke my fucking heart. "We can chase the sunrise together. We can be the sunrise…together."
"Yeah" I said, unable to get the word 'sunrise' from my head. I wanted that. I wanted the fucking sunrise. I wanted the sunrise with Red. ~ Tillie Cole

although we all have dark bruised spots on our pasts that never seem to heal. Instead of fading, they pass through the colours of the rainbow, shining dully, differently, on each and every moment in our lives. ~ Heather Birrell

Your past doesn't actually exist. What you think is your past is a tiny blip of electricity in your brain happening right now. And if that's happening now, what's actually happening right now isn't really happening for you at all. This is what it is meant when people say, live in the present. ~ Dan Pearce

I'm supposed to learn something. A lesson, like in some teenybopper show. I stare at the door and wait for Miley Cyrus to come barreling in, singing tunelessly about our pasts being the key to our futures. ~ Rachel Harris

In the end, we are what our pasts have made us and we live the lives the gods have chosen for us. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

How often do you think we write our own ending before the story is even finished? How often do we give up on ourselves when our lives are just starting? Things get hard and we immediately back away and assume that means we're going in the wrong direction, doing the wrong thing. If anything, when the waters get thick, that's our sign to keep going. ~ Rachel Van Dyken

We should kill our pasts with each passing day. Blot them out, so that they will not hurt. Each present day could thus be endured more easily, it would not be measured against what no longer exists. As things are, spectres mix with our lives so that there is neither pure memory nor pure life. They clash and try to strangle each other, continually ~ Mesa Selimovic

I am a collection of the obsolete, a relic of the damned, of the lost and strayed. I am the waylaid pieces of history which sank out of sight in all of our pasts. Such an accumulation of riffraff has never before been imagined. ~ Frank Herbert

Bruce, we've been defined by our pasts. Everyone is, but I just think some souls can take more than others. It's not their fault if they can't.'

I thought of my mother and couldn't have agreed more - and couldn't have loved Jenn more for saying it. ~ Jake Remington

We're all guilty of hiding things - it's the nature of the world today. We hide our feelings, we hide our pasts, we hide our true intentions. There's no way to know what's real anymore. ~ Suzanne Young

We all have a lot of rubbish in our pasts. At some point, we need to step over the piles and get on with it. ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Life just is and the gods have their plans for us. We're powerless against them. In the end, we are what our pasts have made us and we live the lives the gods have chosen for us.
-Syn ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Haven't you ever heard the saying that our pasts do not define us?" I countered, growing frustrated. "I screwed up, Hayden. I admitted that. Why can't you let it go?"
"Let it go?" He sneered. "You are the reason my sister is a Program. Please, tell me how I'm supposed to let something like that go? Because I'd love to know."
Footsteps sounded from outside of the holding cell, essentially ending our conversation. I still had much to say to him, but for now, I welcomed the silence.
The silence was much more comforting than the truth. ~ Nicole Sobon

We are all affected by our pasts, but it is within our power not to let what we have done to dictate what we will do. ~ Kristin Cast

Develop a healthy relationship with food. If you're hungry, eat. If you're full, don't eat. Eat vegetables to be good to your body, but eat ice cream to be good to your soul.

Take pictures of yourself frequently. Chronicle your life. Selfies are completely underrated. Even if the pictures are unflattering, keep them anyway. There will always be mountains and cities and buildings, but you will never look the same way as you did in that one moment in time.

Your worth does not depend on how desirable someone finds you. Spend less time in front of the mirror and more time with people who make you feel beautiful.

Close doors. Don't hold onto things that no longer brings you happiness and do not help you grow as a person. It is okay to walk away from toxic relationships. You are not weak for letting go.

Forgive yourself. We all have something in our pasts that we are ashamed of, but they only weigh us down if we allow them to. Make amends with the old you and work every day to become the person that you've always wanted to be. ~ Tina Tran

If you don't want your past to own you, try owning your past. ~ Dan Pearce

Think of the most discouraging thing that you are currently carrying or the biggest project you can't seem to tackle. Forget about how it happened, forget about how you got there, just look at the clock, and before that number changes, do one little thing to make it better. After you do, enjoy your moment of victory, and then do it again. In less than the time it takes you to blink, the past will burden you no more. ~ Dan Pearce

We obviously both have our pasts, but that's not important right now. I don't have to know every bad thing you ever did in your life to know that you're a good guy now. People change, grow up, get smarter, move on. In ten years I could be completely different, but I'll never be the person I was yesterday, or even this morning. I don't want to be. I want to try to be better with each second I'm alive." - SHEA ~ Michelle Warren

The world tells us that our pasts define us, trapping us, isolating us and giving us little hope for change or betterment. I say our pasts design us for what's to come and gives us a platform to be heroes in the lives of others. ~ Shawn M Mcnamara

With tremendous clarity and wisdom, Daniel Tomasulo has crafted a memoir at once heartbreaking and uplifting. Layers of time and memory - childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle age - are so beautifully revealed here, a trenchant reminder that our pasts are alive inside of us. There are psychologists who can write, and writers who can psychologize, but rarely have the two met on the page with such moving, profound results. ~ Dani Shapiro

Our pasts haunt us all.
I regaled my beautiful audience of one with the tale of my life, not so much for entertainment, but for bold, barefaced, honest truth. ~ Ross Turner

Our pasts always haunt us. But sometimes the ghosts are friendly, and the memories they bring with them sweet as well as bitter. ~ Kat Howard

Food has powers. It picks us up from our lonely corners and sits us back down, together. It pulls us out of ourselves, to the kitchen, to the table, to the diner down the block. At the same time, it draws us inward. Food is the keeper of our memories, connecting us with our pasts and with our people. ~ Jessica Fechtor

To deny our pasts is to burn the bridge we must cross to self-understanding. Alan Christoffersen's diary ~ Richard Paul Evans

We remember the pains of our pasts, so we don't make the same mistakes in our futures. ~ Michael Archambault

Are we slaves of our pasts? or can we rise above it? ~ Hiba Fatima Ahmad

Our pasts might shape us, but they weren't the end sum of us. ~ Jeaniene Frost

Who fixes broken people? Is it only other broken people, ones who've already been ruined? And do we need to be fixed? It was the messiness and hurt in our pasts that drove us, and that same hurt connected us at a subdermal level, the kind of scars written so deeply in your cells that you can't even see them anymore, only recognize them in someone else. ~ Leah Raeder

Even the good things from our pasts still only belonged in the past ~ Cora Carmack

We can't erase the secrets and marred memories of our pasts, but we can build the next chapter of our lives together. ~ Tillie Cole

If you leave, we lose and our pasts win. ~ Sylvia Day

I'd prefer to think that we aren't all so mercilessly bound to our pasts. ~ Brittany Cavallaro

Southern women are unique; there is no disputing that. We are women born of conflict, our pasts littered with battles and chaos, self-preservation, and protection. We've run plantations during wars, served Union soldiers tea before watching them burn our homes, hidden slaves from prosecution, and endured centuries of watching and learning from our men's mistakes. It is not easy to survive life in the South. It is even more difficult to do it with a smile on your face. We have held these states together, held our dignity and graciousness, held our head high when it was smeared with blood and soot. We are strong. We are Southern. We have secrets and lives you will never imagine. ~ Alessandra Torre

Keep your life in a positive perspective. We are not defined by our pasts ~ Ray J

We identify our secrets, our pasts and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes us one less of oneself. But it's just the opposite, more is more is more
more bleeding, more giving. These things, details, stories, whatever are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see. What does he care where it is, who sees it, this snake, and his skin? He leaves it where it molts. Hours, days or months later, we come across a snake's long-shed skin and we know something of the snake, we know that it's of this approximate girth and that approximate length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now? What the snake is thinking now? No. By now the snake could be wearing fur; the snake could be selling pencils in Hanoi. The skinks no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and he and everyone could look at it. ~ Dave Eggers

Maybe becoming a spiritually healthy family is not about becoming a perfect family but rather following a perfect God together. And in doing so, to find peace with Him, our pasts, and our family members. ~ Michelle Anthony

We have a long road ahead of us because of our pasts. We both still struggle on a daily basis, and I can't swear to you that will ever stop. But it doesn't feel impossible when I'm with you. You make me smile and laugh. You make things right even when the world feels completely wrong. Sarah, it's easy to remember why I should open my eyes every morning when the first thing they see is you. ~ Anonymous

For some reason the past - any of our pasts - was solidly off-limits. They were like the creepy rabbits in Watership Down who won't answer any questions beginning with "Where. ~ Tana French

We colour the world,
Not with the darkness of our pasts,
But with the rainbow of our hope. ~ Jenim Dibie

To be ridiculously sweeping: baby boomers and their offspring have shifted emphasis from the communal to the individual, from the future to the present, from virtue to personal satisfaction. Increasingly secular, we pledge allegiance to lowercase gods of our private devising. We are concerned with leading less a good life than the good life. In contrast to our predecessors, we seldom ask ourselves whether we serve a greater social purpose; we are more likely to ask ourselves if we are happy. We shun self-sacrifice and duty as the soft spots of suckers. We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and we're not especially bothered by what happens once we're dead. As we age - oh, so reluctantly! - we are apt to look back on our pasts and question not did I serve family, God and country, but did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat? We will assess the success of our lives in accordance not with whether they were righteous, but with whether they were interesting and fun.

If that package sounds like one big moral step backward, the Be Here Now mentality that has converted from sixties catchphrase to entrenched gestalt has its upsides. There has to be some value in living for today, since at any given time today is all you've got. We justly cherish characters c ~ Lionel Shriver

Somewhere in the distance, the synchronic circles of our pasts had tripped a domino, and the steady whirr had grown till it now drowned with the roar of contingency ~ Craig Johnson

For better or worse, our pasts and experiences are what define us. But they don't have to rule us. In time, all hurts can be forgiven. It's only when you add to them that they can't. - Nero ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Once your past no longer has the power to define you, your future is, quite literally, yours for the taking. Every single beautiful thing you could possibly want or imagine will be yours. ~ Dan Pearce

Being in love, she concluded, is simply a presentation of our pasts to another individual, mostly packages so unwieldy that we can no longer manage the loosened strings alone. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

For those who have walked through the fires of hell and rather than fall to its flames, have emerged battered, but victorious. In the immortal words of Ovid: Quin ninc quoque frigidus artus, dum loquor, horror habet, parsque est meminisse doloris- Even now while I tell it, cold horror envelops me and my pains return the minute I think of it. We can never escape the pain of our pasts, or the flashbacks that assault us when we dare to let our thoughts drift unattended, but we can choose to not let it ruin the future we, alone, can build for ourselves.
And for those who are currently trapped in a bad situation. May you find the resolute strength it takes to free yourself, and to finally see the beauty that lives inside you. You are resplendent, and you deserve respect and love. Don't let the minions of hatred or cruelty define you, or steal away your own humanity. When our compassion and ability to love and appreciate others go, then our bullies and oppressors have truly won, for it is not they who are harmed, but rather we who lose our souls and hearts to the same miserable bitterness that causes them to lash out against us. The cycle can be broken- it must be broken, even though the path is never easy or without cost. Yet victory is made sweeter when you know it came from within you, without violent retribution. The best revenge is to leave them mired in their hateful misery while you learn to bask in the warmth of self-esteem and happiness. Never forget that broken wing ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

We are made of our pasts, and our pains, our joys and our losses. It's in the very fiber of our beings. Written on our hearts. ~ Jessi Kirby

All those glances, all the unspoken everythings. I think of all of us, passing each other like turtles, heaving our pasts on our backs. ~ Helena Fox

It's the pressing on toward the goal that is important, not simply trying to look perfect or be perfect. And it's also important to forget what is behind us, because we cannot change our pasts. We can, however, look forward and fix our eyes on Jesus as we listen to His direction. ~ Michelle Anthony

We all have our pasts. I suspect we keep them nebulous not because we are hiding from our yesterdays but because we think we will cut more romantic figures if we roll our eyes and dispense delicate hints about beautiful women forever beyond our reaches. Those men whose stories I have uprooted are running from the law, not a tragic love affair. ~ Glen Cook

Everywhere, it seemed, I had to explore two pasts and two presents; one white, one black, separate and unreconcilable. The past had poisoned the present and the present, in turn, now poisoned remembrance of things past. ~ Tony Horwitz

The difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show. ~ T. S. Eliot

I want people to consider the idea that the only way of moving forward with their lives is to revisit and confront their issues and their pasts. ~ Sara Blecher

What the eye is to the lover - that particular, ordinary eye he or she is born with - language - whatever language history has made his or her mother-tongue - is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at mother's knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed. ~ Benedict Anderson

Justice isn't about fixing the past; it's about healing the past's future. ~ Jackson Burnett

According to the strange mathematics of the god of mutual affinity, the shadows that clouded their pasts when united became only half as dense instead of darker.

- The World And The Door ~ O. Henry

I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

The unlikely group that resulted from the union of five diverse characters in their late twenties operated with surprising harmony. This cohesiveness could be attributed to two factors: 1) everyone's issues and embarrassing pasts were plainly disclosed prior to the gang's formation and 2) the clan had been expressly conceived as a male support group. ~ Zack Love

Only when people got back to when the timequake hit did they stop being robots of their pasts. Only when free will kicked in could they stop running obstacle courses of their own construction. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

We all have pasts and we all have futures. All we can do is choose to live in one or the other. It doesn't seem to me that there's much point living in the past. ~ Jayne Ann Krentz

Societies are not trapped by their pasts and freely borrow ideas and institutions from each other. ~ Francis Fukuyama

I didn't need to follow these particular bicycles anymore.They'd found their rightful place. They'd descended through the seven rings of fire--of importation, sale, impoundment, auction, contraband, confiscation, and donation--and here they were again in the hands of fresh new cyclist. It was as if the bikes had graduated from weird times on the traveling freak show, having filled the roles of the reptile man, the fire-eater, the sword-swallower, and now in retirement they'd become staid, calm, dutiful, and serviceable again--like postal workers, customs clerks, and crosswalk guards with colorful, secret pasts. ~ Kimball Taylor

Comes to shove, they're forced to make choices neither are eager to make, and Jesse and Rowen have to face what their lives might look like without the other. Can two people with such tragic pasts and different presents expect a promising future together? Whatever the answer, they'll need a lot more than love to make it. All she wants to do is forget. Forget the memory of walking in on her boyfriend in the middle of, well, another girl. Forget how she had her entire life planned out. And forget about ~ Anonymous

Yes, the ugliness of humanity can destroy you, it can lead to your destruction, you can sabotage others unknowingly or self-sabotage yourself and in the end, you will learn to secretly despise yourself and despise others at the same time. People never talk about what comes with freedom. The price of freedom. The lives that were lost in the process of its beautiful acquisition. They do not seem to realise that in the wrong hands it was a commodity for generations. People were lynched for it. They were raped for it. Nasty things (instead people will say let us sign papers and treaties and draw up constitutions). The bits and pieces of history become the literally and figuratively the past. Change yourself and you will change the past's 'yolk of blood'. ~ Abigail George

The pure reactionary is not a dreamer of abolished pasts, but a hunter of sacred shades on the eternal hills. ~ Nicolas Gomez Davila

In some universes, all possible pasts funnel towards a single fixed ending, Ω.

It you are of millenarian bent, you might call Ω Armageddon, If you are of grammatical bent, you might call it punctuation on a cosmological scale.

If you are a philosopher in such a universe, you might call Ω inevitable. ~ Yoon Ha Lee

If we say that monsters [people who do terrible evil] are beyond forgiving, we give them a power they should never have ... they are given the power to keep their evil alive in the hearts of those who suffered most. We give them power to condemn their victims to live forever with the hurting memory of their painful pasts. We give the monsters the last word. ~ Lewis B. Smedes

The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited, paralyzed, in the present. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I love characters who are kind of haunted by their pasts, who struggle on despite their flaws, knowing that, at the end of the day, they're not going to shuffle off to those pearly gates. ~ Jason Aaron

Because to ignore what had happened in the recent and distant pasts, to turn away and look elsewhere because it was easier to do so, was to be an accomplice to the crimes that were committed. To refuse to delve deeper would be to collude with the offenders. ~ John Connolly

No one who's lived and known reflection
Could help but scorn the human host.
No one who's sampled life's complexion
Could fail to fear his dead past's ghost. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Your past's a private matter, sweetheart. You just keep it locked up in xbox where it can't hurt anyone. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Respectable Shadowhunters are not supposed to bring my sort home to meet Mom and Dad. I have a past. I have several pasts. Besides, good Shadowhunter boys aren't meant to bring home boyfriends at all. ~ Cassandra Clare

With rocky and dangerous pasts, comes determination and self-sacrifice. ~ Amanda Bennett

I have always believed that places with long history, especially those in which terrible events have taken place, retain something of those times, some trace in the air, just as I have been in many a cathedral all over the world and sensed the impress of centuries of prayers and devotions. Places are often filled with their own pasts and exude a sense of then, an atmosphere of great good or great evil, which can be picked up by anyone sensitive to their surroundings. ~ Susan Hill

Look, neither of us is a superhero, nor even especially virtuous. When we met we were just two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams. But somehow we found each other, and we became friends.
And that, you will see, made all the difference for us both. ~ Laura Schroff, Alex Tresniowski

Look around at the countries of Europe, and you'll find that practically all of them have pasts that are just as tragic as Ireland's, yet the people seem able to find some creative way at moving into the future. ~ Jennifer Johnston

[Writing about themselves] gives them wings, so that they can rise above the confounding maze of their lives and, from that perspective, begin to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and a way out. That's the funny thing about mazes; what's baffling on the ground begins to make sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself. ~ Wally Lamb

We can't change out pasts. All we can change is the future. ~ Sylvain Reynard

What a silly routine, Natalie thought, not realizing, sitting there alone on the stool in the center of the ring of girls, how she was jeopardizing her own future in college, her own future for four years and perhaps for the rest of her life; how even worse than the actual being a bad sport was the state of mind which led her into defiance of this norm, this ring of placid, masked girls, with their calm futures ahead and their regular pasts proven beyond a doubt; how one person stepping however aside from their meaningless, echoing standards, set perhaps by a violent movement before their recollection, and handed down to them by other placid creatures, might lose a seat among them by questions, by rebellion, by anything except a cheerful smile and a resolution to hurt other people. ~ Shirley Jackson

Try to visualize all the streams of human interaction, of communication. All those linking streams flowing in and between people, through text, pictures, spoken words and TV commentaries, streams through shared memories, casual relations, witnessed events, touching pasts and futures, cause and effect. Try to see this immense latticework of lakes and flowing streams, see the size and awesome complexity of it. This huge rich environment. This waterway paradise of all information and identities and societies and selves. ~ Steven Hall

You should not look at what the person used to do, rather you should
look at what kind of person they are today. The one who gets bogged
down about people's pasts, is just like Iblees who said to Allaah,
"You created me from fire and you created him from clay". ~ Ibn Taymiyyah

Advanced cultures are usually sophisticated enough, or have been sophisticated enough at some point in their pasts, to realize that foxes shouldn't be relied on to guard henhouses. ~ Jane Jacobs