Worrying About The Past Quotes

Worrying about the past won't help. I can only deal with the present. ~ Joelle Charbonneau

I'd been so busy worrying about the past, that I was letting it steal from my present, and possibly my future. ~ Danielle Garrett

Worrying about the past is tending the ashes instead of the fire. ~ A.R. Simmons

Instead of worrying about the past or the future, we should appreciate things just as they are in the moment, in the now. ~ Hector Garcia Puigcerver

So stop worrying about the past. The past is for ghosts. We've all done things that we regret. It's what's ahead of us that counts. ~ Jonathan Stroud

No amount of guilt can change the past, and no amount of worrying can change the future. Go easy on yourself, for the outcome of all affairs is determined by Allaah's decree.
If something is meant to go elsewhere, it will never come your way, but if it is yours by destiny, from it you cannot flee. ~ Umar Ibn Al-Khattaab

Worrying about the past or the future isn't productive. When you start chastising yourself for past mistakes, or seeing disaster around every corner, stop and take a breath and ask yourself what you can do right now to succeed. ~ Harvey MacKay

No sense in worrying about the past. It's not going to worry about you. ~ Chelsea M. Cameron

Anxiety is stemmed from worrying about the past and worrying about the future! ~ John Di Lemme

If you're worrying about the past, you've got a good chance of screwing up the future. ~ Howard A. Tullman

A medicine cat has no time for doubt. Put your energy into today and stop worrying about the past. ~ Erin Hunter

My mouth opened.
It happened.
Yes, with my head thrown into the sky, I started howling.
Arms stretched out next to me, I howled, and everything came out of me. Visions pored up my throat and past voices surrounded me. The sky listened. The city didn't. I didn't care. All I cared about was that I was howling so that I could hear my voice and so I would remember that the boy had intensity and something to offer. I howled, oh, so loud and desperate, telling a world that I was here and I wouldn't lie down. ~ Markus Zusak

But what Marie-Laure remembered, standing at the rail as it whistled past, was her father saying that Foucault's pendulum would never stop. It would keep swinging, she understood, after she and her father left the Pantheon, after she had fallen asleep that night. After she had forgotten about it, and lived her entire life, and died. ~ Anthony Doerr

I can no longer hear my voices, so I am a little lost. My suspicion is they would know far better how to tell this story. At least they would have opinions and suggestions and definite ideas as to what should go first and what should go last and what should go in the middle. They would inform me when to add detail, when to omit extraneous information, what was important and what was trivial. After so much time slipping past, I am not particularly good at remembering these things myself and could certainly use their help. A great many events took place, and it is hard for me to know precisely where to put what. And sometimes I'm unsure that incidents I clearly remember actually did happen. A memory that seems one instant to be as solid as stone, the next seems as vaporous as a mist above the river. That's one of the major problems with being crazy: you're just naturally uncertain about things. (9) ~ John Katzenbach

Are all the scientists here men, then?" "Scientists?" Oiie asked, incredulous. Pae coughed. "Scientists. Oh, yes, certainly, they're all men. There are some female teachers in the girls' schools, of course. But they never get past Certificate level." "Why not?" "Can't do the math; no head for abstract thought; don't belong. You know how it is, what women call thinking is done with the uterus! Of course, there's always a few exceptions, God-awful brainy women with vaginal atrophy." "You Odonians let women study science?" Oiie inquired. "Well, they are in the sciences, yes." "Not many, I hope." "Well, about half. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Hello Everyone! My name is Dan Brown and in the course of writing my first novel, some other guy, claiming to be me, had the chutzpah to steal my name and publish a book about some code that apparently became quite popular, so much so in fact that copies of it, as well as subsequent novels by the same guy, now accost me every time I visit a brick & mortar or online bookstore these days. Long story short, when I published my first novel (Roll Over, Hitler!) this past month, I decided to use my full name – Daniel Bruce Brown – which would have pleased my parents to no end had they still been alive, but basically makes me unknown to anyone who knows me by Dan Brown, which has to be, I don't know, at least ten or fifteen people. So, anyway, here I am, hoping to be "discovered" and, in the meantime, hoping to make some new friends among folks who love the written word as much as I do. ~ Daniel Bruce Brown

By this time it was well past midnight. You know how that is. It's a time when you start asking questions about things that in the light of day you wouldn't consider twice. It's a time … well, we both know how that goes, in the dark hour. ~ David Nickle

Don't let regrets about the past or worries about the future rob you of your enjoyment of the present. ~ Nicky Gumbel

It occurs to me that there is so much I never knew about him
his past, his role in the resistance, what his life was like in the Wilds, before he came to Portland, and I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed. ~ Lauren Oliver

One of these days...when I am brave enough.
I will take you on a journey...
I will tell you about my life.
My past, my present, my future.
My reasons for being and my being for a reason...
My attempts to be me and my me to be attempts...
My courage in the face of danger, and my danger in the face of courage...
Let me gather my wit, my wit to gather...
so I can tell you my story...my story can you tell?
Sonia Valencia Singh 11/27/13 ~ Sonia Valencia Singh

While I stood on the front porch, watching him climb into his vehicle, I breathed in the humid air. I looked at the cloudless sky, and the blue vastness of it made me think about the endless opportunities that lay ahead for me. Life, I knew, was going to be different now ... better. I was going to live for today and for the future. Dear past ... thank you for the lessons. Dear future ... I am ready. ~ Debra Kay

According to convention, I am not simply what I am doing now. I am also what I have done, and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost more the real "me" than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions of what I will be in the future, and so it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is! ~ Alan W. Watts

I've lost the TARDIS as well.'
I [Amy] was outraged. Considering my husband was dying and we were stranded in the past, the Doctor seemed fairly calm about things. 'Someone's nicked it!'
'Not so much, no.' The Doctor looked awkward. 'There's a mechanism ... thingy. If the TARDIS senses a threat it removes itself from the scene. First sign of danger, it goes and hides behind the curtains.'
'Whose genius idea was that?'
The Doctor swallowed, embarrassed. He claims to be the last of the most advanced race in the universe. Sometimes, I'm just not convinced. ~ James Goss

Something weird moved through me, a feeling of familiarity, and as I stood in front of my locker, I found myself thinking of the one bright thing in a past full of shadows and darkness.
I thought about the boy who made my chest hurt, the one who'd promised forever.
It had been four years since I'd seen him or even heard him speak. Four years of trying to erase everything that had to do with that portion of my childhood, but I remembered him. I wondered about him.
How could I not? I always would.
He had been the sole reason I survived the house we'd grown up in. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

Cecily peers at the murky grey liquid and frowns at a cube of meat that's floating against the rim. "What was this in a past life?" she asks.
"Pigeons and a field rabbit," Reed says. "Hunted them down myself."
"He's an excellent shot," Linden says.
"Can you eat pigeons, though?" Cecily falls back into her chair, looking a mix of disgusted and curious.
"You can eat just about anything," Reed says, dumping a ladleful into her bowl. ~ Lauren DeStefano

The thought that makes most people the weakest is shame, which produces humiliation. The importance of forgiving yourself cannot be stated strongly enough. If you carry around thoughts of shame about what you've done in the past, you're weakening yourself both physically and emotionally. Similarly, if you use a technique of shame and humiliation on anyone to get them to reform, you're going to create a weakened person who will never become empowered until those shameful and humiliating thoughts are removed. Removing your own thoughts of shame involves a willingness to let go, to see your past behaviors as lessons you had to learn, and to reconnect to your source through prayer and meditation. ~ Wayne W. Dyer

Mr. Upchurch," she fumbled. "I . . . I must take my leave directly. But before I go, allow me to say how sorry I am for the callous way I treated you in the past. I regret it most keenly."
His heart squeezed even as he felt his brows rise. "Do you?"
She swallowed. "I was wrong about you. I was wrong about a great many things. ~ Julie Klassen

It must be understood that in some cases the process by which a god or goddess degenerates into a fairy may occupy centuries, and that in the passage of generations such an alteration may be brought about in appearance and traits as to make it seem impossible that any relationship actually exists between the old form and the new. This may be accounted for by the circumstance that in gradually assuming the traits of fairyhood the god or goddess may also have taken on the characteristics of fairies which Already existed in the minds of the folk, the elves of a past age, who were already elves at a period when he or she still flourished in the full vigour of godhead. For in one sense Faerie represents a species of limbo, a great abyss of traditional material, into which every kind of ancient belief came to be cast as the acceptance of one new faith after another dictated the abandonment of forms and ideas unacceptable to its doctrines. The difference between god and fairy is indeed the difference between religion and folk-lore. ~ Lewis Spence

In the past, I've been reluctant to share any bits of truth about myself or to really let people in on my reality. So I have said some things to throw people off the scent of what's really going on in my life. So I have sort of aided the media in printing these misconceptions, which I regret. ~ Megan Fox

Unlike my father, who blindly churned out one canvas after another, I had real ideas about the artistic life. Seated at my desk, my beret as tight as an acorn's cap, I projected myself into the world represented in the art books I'd borrowed from the public library. Leafing past the paintings, I would admire the photographs of the artists seated in their garrets, dressed in tattered smocks and frowning in the direction of their beefy nude models. To spend your days in the company of naked men – that was the life for me. 'Turn a bit to the left, Jean-Claude. I long to capture the playful quality of your buttocks. ~ David Sedaris

The great thing about having a serialized drama (like 'Sons of Anarchy') is that I'm allowed to bring up events and circumstances that have happened in the past in other episodes to show that this kind of violence doesn't happen in a vacuum. It has ramifications. It has repercussions. Whether it's a week from now or five years from now, you know it will play out. Nothing is ever tied up into a perfect knot. ~ Kurt Sutter

The past doesn't exist except as a memory, a mental story, and though past events aren't changeable, your stories about them are. You can act now to transform the way you tell the story of your past, ultimately making it a stalwart protector of your future. ~ Martha Beck

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past. ~ Peter Greenaway

People complain about the obscurity of poetry, especially if they're assigned to write about it, but actually poetry is rather straightforward compared to ordinary conversation with people you don't know well which tends to be jumpy repartee, crooked, coded, allusive to no effect, firmly repressed, locked up in irony, steadfastly refusing to share genuine experience--think of conversation at office parties or conversation between teenage children and parents, or between teenagers themselves, or between men, or between bitter spouces: rarely in ordinary conversation do people speak from the heart and mean what they say. How often in the past week did anyone offer you something from the heart? It's there in poetry. Forget everything you ever read about poetry, it doesn't matter--poetry is the last preserve of honest speech and the outspoken heart. All that I wrote about it as a grad student I hereby recant and abjure--all that matters about poetry to me is directness and clarity and truthfulness. All that is twittery and lit'ry: no thanks, pal. A person could perish of entertainment, especially comedy, so much of it casually nihilistic, hateful, glittering, cold, and in the end clueless. People in nusing homes die watching late-night television and if I were one of them, I'd be grateful when the darkness descends. Thank God if the pastor comes and offers a psalm and a prayer, and they can attain a glimmer of clarity at the end. ~ Garrison Keillor

I've painted in the past, but I only average about one painting a year, and the last painting I did, I actually really liked. ~ Mike Mignola

You know, I guess I just don't like to talk a lot about sad things. Now you know my flaw. What good does it do to talk about sad things in the past? ~ James Patterson

Don't jump to conclusions over first impressions.

They're often dead wrong. When I first met Mark, I thought he was spoiled. When I met Shirley, I assumed she was tough as nails. But getting to know them both as a member of their family, I saw how wrong I was. Shirley is a teddy bear, a caring, loving person who would do anything for me. And Mark? I think of him as a brother, in every sense of the word. I've learned to make a special effort to get to know the people who put up walls and seem cold or tough. It's like an onion; you have to peel back the layers. I'm sure some of my DWTS partners made an assumption about who I was the first time they worked with me. They probably thought I was a tough taskmaster and cursed me out for putting them through this! But anyone who truly knows me will tell you, I'm harder on myself than I am on anyone else. And I'm a softie who loves to goof around. But to see that side of me, you need to move past the first impression. What's the lesson here? Dig a little deeper. Get to know people and what makes them tick. Don't make an assumption till you know someone a lot better. Think of all the people you might have dismissed who could have been great friends, mentors, or allies, if you'd only given them the chance.
Perfect example: dancing with Lil' Kim on DWTS. She had recently spent time in jail and I remember thinking, Oh my gosh, I'm afraid I'm going to get shanked in the middle of the dance! Then I realized I was judging her ~ Derek Hough

There is no justifiable prediction about how the hypothesis will hold up in the future; its degree of corroboration simply is a historical statement describing how severely the hypothesis has been tested in the past. ~ Robert Nozick

Stained is about a lonely bookshop keeper, and her past comes back to haunt her. I play a femme fatale, schizophrenic serial killer. They offered me the part and I was like, "I'm just curious why you thought I would be perfect for this role," and the director (Karen Lam) said, "You have this look that, when you're smiling, you're really sweet, but when you're not smiling, you look like you could kill somebody." ~ Tinsel Korey

You want to find out what it is about you or what it is about your past and your lineage that's in you now, and whether you carry those traits and maybe what one's mission is to take it to the next level. ~ Olivia D'Abo

And I'd say one of the great lessons I've learned over the past couple of decades, from a management perspective, is that really when you come down to it, it really is all about people and all about leadership. ~ Steve Case

He wanted to hide by shrinking past zero, through the dot at the end of himself, to a negative size, into an otherworld, where he would find a place - in an enormous city, too large to know itself, or some slowly developing suburb - to be alone and carefully build a life in which he might be able to begin, at some point, to think about what to do about himself. ~ Tao Lin

We're not going to think about what's happened in the past. ~ Blake Griffin

You create your luck by being healthy and not regretting the past or being anxious about the future. ~ James Altucher

Larry's short list for doing better: Stop complaining about your results. (No one really cares, anyway.) Whining about the problem only prolongs the problem. Take a realistic look at your results and think about what you have done or not done in the past that contributed to them. Go to the closest mirror, look yourself in the eye, and say, "This is all my fault." Take responsibility. Do a reality check and admit that change has been going on for a good long while and you survived. You will survive this, too. Make a list of what you are going to do differently in the future to change your results. Doing better is the result of deciding to do better and then taking action on that decision. Get ~ Larry Winget

Any time you lose a few in a row, you have to hit reset and come back tomorrow and do the best you can to forget about how the past series went. It's frustrating. Individually it's frustrating. I'm trying to figure it out. And I know as a team, it sucks losing a few in a row any time. So you know, we'll snap out of it. ~ Adam LaRoche

When Bill Clinton chose Al Gore in 1992 - from the same generational, ideological, and geographical background as his - it underscored his campaign's central argument that this was a clash between the past and the future, that 'Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow' was indeed the campaign's anthem. ~ Jeff Greenfield

Astonishment: these women's military professions - medical assistant, sniper, machine gunner, commander of an antiaircraft gun, sapper - and now they are accountants, lab technicians, museum guides, teachers…Discrepancy of the roles - here and there. Their memories are as if not about themselves, but some other girls. Now they are surprised at themselves. Before my eyes history "humanizes" itself, becomes like ordinary life. Acquires a different lighting. I've happened upon extraordinary storytellers. There are pages in their lives that can rival the best pages of the classics. The person sees herself so clearly from above - from heaven, and from below - from the ground. Before her is the whole path - up and down - from angel to beast. Remembering is not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a reality that is no more, but a new birth of the past, when time goes in reverse. Above all it is creativity. As they narrate, people create, they "write" their life. Sometimes they also "write up" or "rewrite." Here you have to be vigilant. On your guard. At the same time pain melts and destroys any falsehood. The temperature is too high! Simple people - nurses, cooks, laundresses - behave more sincerely, I became convinced of that…They, how shall I put it exactly, draw the words out of themselves and not from newspapers and books they have read - not from others. But only from their own sufferings and experiences. The feelings and language of educated people, strange as it may be, ~ Svetlana Alexievich

My particular interest for the past couple of years has been to really think deeply about the big impendence mismatch we have between programming languages, C# in particular, and the database world, like SQL or, for that matter, the XML world, like XQuery and those languages that exist. ~ Anders Hejlsberg

People are sick sand starving to death in our country, in our streets, and nobody cares. They worry instead about grades and popularity and money and trying to go to America. I don't want to be another one of those people who just pretends like they don't know about the suffering, like they don't see it every single day, like they don't walk past it on their way to school or work. ~ Randy Ribay

His smile was quizzical and sincere as he said, "Sometimes you feel more like an adversary than a…."

"Than a what?"

"Than a girlfriend, a partner."

I thought about that for a moment, let it roll around in my head, realized - given what I knew about Alex's past - it made quite a lot of sense.

"With a girlfriend you'd need to give away some of your control. But with an adversary, it's all about control."

"Don't." His voice was a growl, and held more than a hint of warning.

"Don't what?"

"Don't start psychoanalyzing me."

"I'm not." I sighed, rubbed my forehead, and removed myself from his lap. I sat down heavily on the couch. "I'm just trying to figure out how to get in your pants without asking you any direct questions. ~ Penny Reid

Arian paced the cavern in his mountain in agitation and a wee bit of anxiety. He was shaking off the dragon sleep from the past six hundred years. Not only had it been six centuries since he had been in human form, but there was a war the Dragon Kings were involved in.
Con and the others were waiting for him to join in the war. Every King had been woken to take part. After all the wars they had been involved in, Arian wasn't happy to be woken to join another.
Because of Ulrik. The banished and disgraced Dragon King hadn't just made a nuisance of himself, but he somehow managed to get his magic returned.
Which meant the Kings needed to put extra magic into keeping the four silver dragons sleeping undisturbed deep within the mountain. They were Ulrik's dragons, and he would want to wake them soon.
But it wasn't just Ulrik that was causing mischief. The Dark Fae were as well. It infuriated Arian that they were once more fighting the Dark. Hadn't the Fae Wars killed enough Fae and dragons?
Then again, as a Dragon King as old as time itself, they were targets for others who wanted to defeat them.
For Ulrik, he just wanted revenge. Arian hated him for it, but he could understand. Mostly because Arian had briefly joined Ulrik in his quest to rid the realm of humans.
Thoughts of Ulrik were pushed aside as Arian found himself thinking about why he had taken to his mountain. When he came here six hundred years earlier, it was to remain there for many ~ Donna Grant

Something had broken inside her. No past or future, no sense of time, each day as endless as it was to a child. Linh had been right about her being a tourist of the war in the beginning, but with that detachment there had also been a kind of strength. As Darrow had said, there was a price to mastery. Now she was in limbo, neither an observer of the country, nor a part of it. For the first time since she was a child, she considered praying, but it seemed small and cowardly this late in the game. ~ Tatjana Soli

Jim, here's what I'm going to do," Kalinske said, now skimming through his Rolodex. "I think I have the name of someone who might be very interested in hearing about what SGI has to offer." Kalinske scrolled past the beginning of the alphabet, slowing down as he approached the letter L. "Do you have a pen ready?" He kept skimming until he got to the contact information he was searching for: Lincoln, Howard. ~ Blake J. Harris

There is nothing you can do about the past except keep it there. ~ Michael Connelly

The closer Finn`s island come to extinction, the more I wandered back in my mind to the lives that come before us, the huts and the houses, the remains of animals and clothing, the coins and the latrines and cooking pots, the messages from the past left in bones and kitchen dumps. And the people.
Sometimes I thought about the content of those lives, the intangible things that leave no fossils and no marks, no history. Would people from the future excavate traces of passion? Of hope, disappointment, despair? Or would the entire human race end up drowned and forgotten, buried under waves of melting ice, with no on left to dig us up or wonder at what was or what might have been? ~ Meg Rosoff