Past Quotes - Page 40

• I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.

  Margaret Atwood

  Habit, Quaint, Refugee

  "The Handmaid's Tale". Book by Margaret Atwood, 1985.

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• Good-humor only teaches charms to last,
  Still makes new conquests and maintains the past.

  Alexander Pope

  Character, Lasts, Charm

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• Every time I start on a new book, I am a beginner again. I doubt myself, I grow discouraged, all the work accomplished in the past is as though it never was, my first drafts are so shapeless that it seems impossible to go on with the attempt at all, right up until the moment - always imperceptible, there, too, there is a break - when it is has become impossible not to finish it.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Book, Doubt, Beginners

  Simone de Beauvoir (1977). “Force of Circumstance: Hard times”

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• Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in a polite blur.

  Diane Ackerman

  Poetry, Telescopes, Blur

  Diane Ackerman (1999). “Deep Play”, Random House Incorporated

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• Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Country, Needs

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• The Old Guard dies but it never surrenders.

  Margaret Mitchell

  Surrender, Never Surrender, Dies

  Margaret Mitchell (2016). “Gone with the Wind”, p.556, Hamilton Books

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• New York was where we wanted to live when we were finally grown up, and drink martinis and stay out past bedtime.

  Barbara Holland

  New York, Bedtime, Drink

  Barbara Holland (1999). “Wasn't the Grass Greener?: A Curmudgeon's Fond Memories”, Harcourt

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• 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

  Team, Trying, Tomorrow

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• Mindfulness was experienced as not holding onto the past, the future, or 'nowness:' but relaxing into the immediacy of whatever was happening.

  B. Alan Wallace

  Future, Mindfulness, Holding On

  B. Alan Wallace (2014). “Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity”, p.30, Columbia University Press

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• We have but the memories of past good cheer, we have but the echoes of departed laughter. In vain we look and listen for the mirth that has died away. In vain we seek to question the gray ghosts of old-time revelers.

  Agnes Repplier

  Cheer, Laughter, Memories

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• The past is a sorry country.

  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

  Country, Sorry

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• The past can be tamed and controlled.

  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

  Controlled, Tamed

  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (1989). “Italian Days”, p.171, Atlantic Monthly Press

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• science has now been for a long time - and to an ever-increasing extent - a collective enterprise. Actually, new results are always, in fact, the work of specific individuals; but, save perhaps for rare exceptions, the value of any result depends on such a complex set of interrelations with past discoveries and possible future researches that even the mind of the inventor cannot embrace the whole.

  Simone Weil

  Science, Discovery, Long

  Simone Weil (1977). “The Simone Weil Reader”

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• Death. An instantaneous state, without past or future. Indispensable for entering eternity.

  Simone Weil

  Entering, Eternity, States

  Simone Weil (2002). “Gravity and Grace”, p.37, Psychology Press

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• By reading a man does, as it were, antedate his life, and make himself contemporary with the ages past; and this way of running up beyond one's nativity is better than Plato's pre-existence.

  Jeremy Collier

  Running, Plato, Reading

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• We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while there is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime's rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively.

  Harold Bloom

  Journey, Three, Rereading

  Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• We have the bad habit, some of us, of looking back to a time - almost any time will do - when society was stable and orderly, family ties stronger and deeper, love more lasting and faithful, and so on. Let me be your Cassandra prophesying after the fact, and a long study of the documents in the case: it was never true, that is, no truer than it is now.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Family, Ties, Long

  Katherine Anne Porter (2008). “Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings”, p.948, Library of America

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• Each time a friend dies, the present becomes the past, in an instant.

  Lauren Bacall

  Instant, Dies

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• Laura Alicia Deverell was born on May 10th, 1862, at precisely a quarter past one o'clock on a Thursday morning. Those interested in that pseudo-science astrology or astromancy may trace her life and character, if they wish, among the stars, where no doubt it is all written.

  Susan Ertz

  Morning, Stars, Book

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• As far as the media's concerned, Mrs. Obama deserves this. Look at the sordid past. Look at our slave past, look at the discriminatory past. It's only fair that people of color get their taste of the wealth of America too.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Stupid, Media, Color

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• How much past there is in a life, however brief it be.

  Madame de Stael

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• When I read or hear of the mutual injuries of England and Ireland, I fancy it would have been a blessed thing had the sea never flowed between the two countries. Had they been all in one, surely there would have been more unity between them of interests and of feelings. But let us hope that days of peace and general enlightenment will arrive by ways past man's finding out.

  Sara Coleridge

  Country, Blessed, Men

  Sara Coleridge Coleridge (1873). “Memoir and Letters”, p.139

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• What is so nice & so unexpected about life is the way it improves as it goes along. I think you should impress this fact on your children because I think young people have an awful feeling that life is slipping past them & they must do something - catch something - they don't quite know what, whereas they've only got to wait & it all comes.

  Nancy Mitford

  Life, Children, Nice

  Nancy Mitford, Charlotte Mosley (1993). “Love from Nancy: the letters of Nancy Mitford”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

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• I made the mistake of thinking that if you add up the past, you sum up the future; I forgot how frequently life astonishes us.

  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

  Mistake, Thinking, Add

  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (1980). “Off Center: Essays”

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• I was always furious because you couldn't take out more than three books in one day. You would go home with your three books and read them and it would still be only five o'clock. The library didn't shut till half past, but you couldn't change the books till the next day.

  Fay Weldon

  Book, Reading, Home

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