The beauty of the past belongs to the past.

If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.

When I was younger, I used to bite my nails so bad. I used to play sports; I played, like, every sport. I would be playing soccer, and I'd be in the middle of the field just zoned out, biting my...

However, if Sir Launcelot of the Lake failed now and then in his behavior, who is there in the world shall say, 'I never fell into error'? And if he more than once offended, who is there shall have...

It is a mournful task to break the sombre attachments of the past.

Let us not burthen our remembrance withA heaviness that's gone.

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

What is the past but what we choose to remember?

After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?

...the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.

Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike...

It's best to be ruthless with the past.

Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

The past was like those old -fashioned fragrance cushions filled with herbs and flowers, the aroma of which penetrates the clothes and sticks to them.

He ought to let the past keep its glow and not try to mix it with what he had in the present.

At some point the future becomes reality. And then it quickly becomes the past.

But thing in the past are like plate that's shattered to pieces. You can never put it back together like it was, right?

It was strange how the future seemed tied inseparably to the past, so that both revolved through the present, like a great wheel...

They were ready to sell people a future in exchange for their past... They wanted to compel him to cast his life away and become a shadow, a man without past, an actor without a role, and turn even...

Our past thinking has determined our present status, and our present thinking will determine our future status; for man is what man thinks.

I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of...

I think in some ways it's like that for all of us, living with the ghosts of things that used to be, or never were. We're all of us haunted by yesterday, and we got no choice but to keep marching into...

To positively discriminate in favour of groups that have been negatively discriminated against in the past.

That's what I like so much about old libraries - they smell the way we'd like to imagine the past.

The past was always there, lived inside of you, and it helped to make you who you were. But it had to be placed in perspective. The past could not dominate the future.

I stole their future from them; I can only being to repay by seeing what I can learn from their past.

If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous...

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

What I am searching for is the gaps - the silences. This is how I see the past: as an excavation. You sift through the rubble, pick up one fragment here, another there, label it and record where you...

What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you're so wrecked it's hard to believe you ever were a child?