Past Quotes

When these shadows brought into the minds of older people, other thoughts, and showed them different images. When they stole from their retreats, in the likenesses of forms and faces from the past, from the grave, from the deep, deep gulf, where the things that might have been, and never were, are always wandering. ~ The Haunted Man by Charles Dickens Oh, haggard mind, groping darkly through the past; incapable of detaching itself from the miserable present; dragging its heavy chain of care through imaginary feasts and revels, and scenes of awful pomp; seeking but a moment's rest among the long-forgotten haunts of childhood, and the resorts of yesterday; and dimly finding fear and horror everywhere! ~ Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant. ~ The Awakening by Kate Chopin "What's gone and what's past help
Should be past grief." ~ The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare Events are as much the parents of the future as they were the children of the past. ~ Saint's Progress by John Galsworthy It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. It is done. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was. ~ David Copperfield by Charles Dickens "It's in vain, Trot, to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present." ~ David Copperfield by Charles Dickens "Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?" cried he, keeping up the earnest tone of his preceding conversation. "It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body." ~ The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne "The true scientific mind is not to be tied down by its own conditions of time and space. It builds itself an observatory erected upon the border line of present, which separates the infinite past from the infinite future. From this sure post it makes its sallies even to the beginning and to the end of all things." ~ The Poison Belt by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "The object of our lives is won. Henceforth let us wear it silently. My lips are closed upon the past from this hour. I forgive you your part in to-morrow's wickedness. May God forgive my own!" ~ Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens