Painful Past Life Quotes

just got back from a beautiful eve of winter solstice snowshoeing. my heart was lost and enlivened by both the hush of the mountainous snow world and a very fun irreverence with friends. i shared a solstice quote but did not share this one.

so in the spirit of the year--happy solistice! may there be ever present and growing light in your life as nature unfolds the same in the upcoming months.

"sharp is the night, but stars with frost alive leap off the rim of earth across the dome. it is a night to make the heavens our home. more than the nest whereto apace we strive. lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive, in swarms outrushing from the golden comb. they waken waves of thoughts that burst to foam: you throb in me, the dead revive. yon mantle clothes us: there, past mortal breath, life glistens on the river of death. it folds us, flesh and dust; and have we knelt, or never knelt, or eyed as kine the springs of radiance, the radiance enrings: and this is the soul's haven to have felt." --from _winter heavens_ ~ George Meredith

I look at younger girls and I think, 'Doesn't she look great? Isn't she pretty?' And while I know I'll never be there again, I'm past the age of feeling jealous. Maybe in my 30s I would have been, but that part of my life has gone. ~ Trinny Woodall

Generally young men are regarded as radicals. This is a popular misconception. The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates. The radicals are the men past middle life. ~ Woodrow Wilson

To be fair to them, they were only after something that walled them off from the past and from people in general, not something that offered any connection that might prove painful or human. Thet wanted stories, I came to realise, in which they were already imprisoned, not stories in which they appeared along with the storyteller, accomplices in escaping. ~ Richard Flanagan

All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life. ~ Richard Ford

But you only get so many do-overs in this life, so many chances to, if not change your past, alter your future. ~ Sarah Dessen

The clock ticks; the taunting rhythm serving as a reminder that forward is the only way we can go. The mechanical heartbeat of the darkness, a cold ellipsis, punctuating years gone by.
Arising unchained.
No glorious hymn, just the steady beat of the illusion of time. We heal or we carry forward the weight of our wounds ... To believe otherwise is the mendacity of desperation.
Arising honestly.
The miles behind are littered with the weight of nostalgia, but too many miles lay ahead us to carry the weight. In the end, even echoes fade away.
Pen in hand ...
Arising to write the next chapter.
(MU Articles 2013, Dedication to Joey) ~ Shannon L. Alder

[We] have a tendency during meetings to let our minds run wild and cycle through a plethora of thoughts about the past and the future, destroying any aspirations for Zen-like calm and preventing us from being in the here and now: Did I turn off the stove? What will I do for lunch? When do I need to leave here in order to get to where I need to be next?
What if you could rely on others in your life to handle these things and you could narrow your attentional filter to that which is right before you, happening right now? ... A professional musician friend ... describes this state as "happily lost." He doesn't need to look at his calendar more than a day in advance, allowing each day to be filled with wonder and possibility. ~ Daniel J. Levitin

I'm unaccustomed to being cooped up all day-I really must insist that you permit me to enjoy a short walk."
"Not on your life," Fletcher growled.
From the sound, Breckenridge realized the group had moved closer to the tap.
"You don't need to think you're going to give us the slip so easily," Fletcher said again.
"My dear good man"-Heather with her nose in the air; Breckenridge could tell by her tone-"just where in this landscape of empty fields do you imagine I'm going to slip to?"
Cobbins opined that she might try to steal a horse and ride off.
"Oh,yes-in a round gown and evening slippers," Heather jeered. "But I wasn't suggesting you let me ramble on my own-Martha can come with me."
That was Martha's cue to enter the fray, but Heather stuck to her guns, refusing to back down through the ensuing, increasingly heated verbal stoush.
Until Fletcher intervened, aggravated frustration resonating in his voice. "Look you-we're under strict orders to keep you safe, not to let you wander off to fall prey to the first shiftless rake who rides past and takes a fancy to you."
Silence reigned for half a minute, then Heather audibly sniffed. "I'll have you know that shiftless rakes know better than to take a fancy to me."
Not true, Breckenridge thought, but that wasn't the startling information contained in Fletcher's outburst. "Come on, Heather-follow up."
As if she'd heard his muttered exhortation, she blithely swept on. "But if ra ~ Stephanie Laurens

Why do people kill themselves?
I think they do it when they can no longer find a reason to keep going. When nothing in heir lives is good enough to balance out the bad. And they do it when they no longer have the courage to carry on past some recent painful experience. They commit what is, in the end, a desperate, final call for help, that is hopefully heard in time by someone else.
And what if it's not heard in time? I ask although I know the answer.
Then they die. ~ Mary Beth Miller

Over the past two weeks she's worked her way through it [the book], a little each night, savoring the words like a cherry Life Saver tucked inside her cheek. ~ Celeste Ng

At the moment when you know that the projectile is flying towards you, it will infallibly occur to you that this shot will kill you; but the feeling of self-love upholds you, and no one perceives the knife which is cutting your heart. But when the shot has flown past without touching you, you grow animated, and a certain cheerful, inexpressibly pleasant feeling overpowers you, but only for a moment, so that you discover a peculiar sort of charm in danger, in this game of life and death, you want cannon-balls or bombs to strike nearer to you. ~ Leo Tolstoy

If the spread of Pakistani cuisine is the single greatest improvement in British public life over the past half-century, it is also worth noting that the bombs used for the failed London transport attacks of July 21, 2005, were made from a mix of hydrogen peroxide and chapati flour. ~ Christopher Caldwell

I feel quite connected to the past, and my memory. Everything that I've ever done I can still relate to, and feel connected to it in a way. There's no part of my life that I look at and go, 'I don't recognize that person at all.' ~ Ian MacKaye

For a Siddhar yogi, time is precious. It is important to utilize every moment to evolve into ever higher states of consciousness. We understand stagnancy as decay and for growth, we constantly discard the old to welcome change as the new. We tap into the magical abilities to evolve. "Every saint was a sinner in the past" maxim holds true. In the intensity of our yogic pursuit we evolve quickly. By evolving, we know that is the greatest gift of a lifetime we could ever receive- to be angelic as a being of consciousness. Consciousness is ever evolving and dynamic in transforming. ~ Nandhiji

I'm 36 and if I met a woman of my own age and married her, I'd also be marrying her former life, her past. It might be OK for some people - I don't want to judge it or anything - but it's not for me. It would destroy my creativity. ~ Henry Rollins

She had learned to live light because life itself could be heavy enough. ~ Jackson Burnett

As for Proust, his contribution has been to create, from an obstinate contemplation of reality, a closed
world that belonged only to him and that indicated his victory over the transitoriness of things and over
death. But he uses absolutely the opposite means. He upholds, above everything, by a deliberate choice, a
careful selection of unique experience, which the writer chooses from the most secret recesses of his past.
Immense empty spaces are thus discarded from life because they have left no trace in the memory. If the
American novel is the novel of men without memory, the world of Proust is nothing but memory. It is
concerned only with the most difficult and most exacting of memories, the memory that rejects the
dispersion of the actual world and derives, from the trace of a lingering perfume, the secret of a new and
ancient universe. Proust chooses the interior life and, of the interior life, that which is more interior than
life itself in preference to what is forgotten in the world of reality - in other words, the purely mechanical
and blind aspects of the world. But by his rejection of reality he does not deny reality. He does not
commit the error, which would counterbalance the error of American fiction, of suppressing
the mechanical. He unites, on the contrary, into a superior form of unity, the memory of the past and the
immediate sensation, the twisted foot and the happy days of times past. ~ Albert Camus

In order to live a life that is filled with happiness and full of rewards, you must work hard to forgive yourself for past mistakes, and allow yourself to start anew. ~ Dave Shepp

Let today be the day you finally release yourself from the imprisonment of past grudges and anger. Simplify your life. Let go of the poisonous past and live the abundantly beautiful present ... today. ~ Steve Maraboli

This was what he stood for: a world where there would be room enough even for such a mass of clumsy and cumbersome freedom. A margin of humanity, of tolerance, where some of life's beauty could take refuge. His eyes narrowed a little, and an ironic, bitter smile came to his lips. I know you all, he thought. Today you say that elephants are archaic and cumbersome, that they interfere with roads and
telegraph poles, and tomorrow you'll begin to say that human rights too are obsolete and cumbersome, that they interfere with progress, and the temptation will be so great to let them fall by the road and not to burden ourselves with that
extra load. And in the end man himself will become in your eyes a clumsy luxury, an archaic survival from the past, and you'll dispense with him too, and the only thing left will be total efficiency and universal slavery and man himself will disappear under the weight of his material achievement. He had learned that much behind the barbed wire of the forced labor camp: it was our education, a lesson be was not prepared to forget. ~ Romain Gary

You no longer speak of your old friends, your Council, your home. I fear that you are forgetting them, and forgetting your reason for coming here."

Hunter sighed. "It's difficult to talk about them, they don't belong here. Anyway, I thought you wanted me to give up my old life. Congratulations, you've won."

The Abate smiled sadly. "Perhaps I did, I wanted you to abandon your violent past and adopt our ways. But I see that you are giving up everything and taking on nothing. What are you afraid of George? ~ K.S. Marsden

Boys have said in the past that I live my life like a movie. I love all things romantic, like kissing in the rain. ~ Mollie King

The wind of change is clashing with the wind of the past.. The past.. ~ Noha Alaa El-Din

For the Creator, the past is never lost, never beyond recovery - because it can always be reclaimed by weaving it into a wider pattern of ultimate goodness so that even the most horrendous disasters of life may come to play a significant part in achieving the intended purpose of Creation. In this way, the past can be redeemed. ~ Stephen R. Lawhead

The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow. ~ Claudia Rankine

Love seems to survive life, and to reach beyond it. I think we take it with us past the grave. Do we not still give it to those who have left us? May we not hope that they feel it for us, and that we shall leave it here in one or two fond bosoms, when we also are gone? ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

High in the hazy sky, the snowfkakes looked tiny and all alike, but as they drifted past the narrow window of the sewing room, all were unique - long or round or triangular - as if they'd borrowed their shapes from the clouds they'd come from. ~ Ursula Hegi

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

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

Dan Berrigan wrote a "Meditation" at the time of the Catonsville incident:
Our apologies good friends for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise. . . . We say: killing is disorder, life and gentleness and community and unselfishness is the only order we recognize. for the sake of that order, we risk our liberty, our good name. The time is past when good men can remain silent, when obedience can segregate men form public risk, when the poor can die without defense. ~ Howard Zinn

London

The Institute

Year of Our Lord 1878


"Mother, Father, my chwaer fach,

It's my seventeenth birthday today. I know that to write to you is to break the law, I know that I will likely tear this letter into pieces when it is finished. As I have done on all my birthdays past since I was twelve. But I write anyway, to commemorate the occasion - the way some make yearly pilgrimages to a grave, to remember the death of a loved one. For are we not dead to each other?

I wonder if when you woke this morning you remembered that today, seventeen years ago, you had a son? I wonder if you think of me and imagine my life here in the Institute in London? I doubt you could imagine it. It is so very different from our house surrounded by mountains, and the great clear blue sky and the endless green. Here, everything is black and gray and brown, and the sunsets are painted in smoke and blood. I wonder if you worry that I am lonely or, as Mother always used to, that I am cold, that I have gone out into the rain again without a hat? No one here worries about those details. There are so many things that could kill us at any moment; catching a chill hardly seems important.

I wonder if you knew that I could hear you that day you came for me, when I was twelve. I crawled under the bed to block out the sound of you crying my name, but I heard you. I heard mother call for her fach, her little one. I bit my hands until they bl ~ Cassandra Clare

Historical knowledge is a technique of the first order to preserve and continue a civilisation already advanced. Not that it affords positive solutions to the new aspect of vital conditions- life is always different from what it was- but that it prevents us committing the ingenuous mistakes of other times. But if, in addition to being old and, therefore, beginning to find life difficult, you have lost the memory of the past, and do not profit by experience, then everything turns to disadvantage. Well, it is my belief that this is the situation of Europe. The most "cultured" people to-day are suffering from incredible ignorance of history. ~ Ortega Y Gasset

I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

When I write, I don't allow the fear of consequences to interfere with the writing process. I have in the past paid for my commitment to the truth and the way I live my life. I am prepared to pay more if I have to. ~ Taslima Nasrin

Life isn't in our brain // It flows through our veins.
Just a little cut to drain out the galaxies that keep me up tonight.
Just a little cut and all this goes away. Just a little cut and no more thoughts. No memories. No pain. I mean screw nostalgia.
I don't want it. Take it back! ~ Sijdah Hussain

Ireland and its people have much to be proud of. Yet every land and its people have moments of shame. Dealing with the failures of our past, as a country, as a Church, or as an individual is never easy. Our struggle to heal the wounds of decades of violence, injury and painful memory in Northern Ireland are more than ample evidence of this. ~ Sean Brady

Ah, guilt and sorrow had dogged Juan's footsteps too, for he was not a Catholic who could rise refreshed from the cold bath of confession. Yet the banality stood: that the past was irrevocably past. And conscience had been given man to regret it only in so far as that might change the future. For man, every man, Juan seemed to be telling him, even as Mexico, must ceaselessly struggle upward. What was life but a warfare and a stranger's sojourn? ~ Malcolm Lowry

Forget the past. Tomorrow is a new day. New day, new hopes and new life. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Whatever advantages may have arisen, in the past, out of the existence of a specially favored and highly privileged aristocracy, it is clear to me that today no argument can stand that supports unequal opportunity or any intrinsic disqualification for sharing in the whole of life. ~ Margaret Mead

What we did yesterday, Can be changed today to make tomorrow different.. PAST / PRESENT / FUTURE
Precious Present Moments Light Our Path ~ Jonathan Bailey

Regret is counterproductive. It's looking back on a past that you can't change. Questioning things as they occur can prevent regret in the future. ~ Colleen Hoover

That mental states can be inferred from actions. That's in history - Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true: that you can infer past actions from current mental states. ~ Julian Barnes

I see Sarah framed in the light of her doorway and it is like looking at a painting that emanate a mixture of wishes and truths about someone I loved - from a time I can already vividly remember. I wonder if this is a hazard of being a writer: a sense of detachment that sometimes makes the present seem like it is already past. ~ Annie Rogers

If there is a next life, I hope it's in the past; I don't think the future will be any more handleable.
I think it's a little harsh how the END button is red. ~ Ned Vizzini