Your Past Quotes (page 5)
Mornings at Blackwater"For years, every morning, I drankfrom Blackwater Pond. It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt, the feet of ducks. And always it assuaged mefrom the dry bowl of the very far past. What I want to say isthat the past is the past, and the present is what your life is, and you are capableof choosing what that will be, darling citizen. So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And liveyour...
Mary Oliver
You know your mother means to feast with me, And calls herself Revenge, and thinks me mad: Hark, villains! I will grind your bones to dust. And with your blood and it I'll make a paste, And of the paste a coffin I will rear. And make two pasties of your shameful heads, And bid that strumpet, your unhallow'd dam, Like to the earth swallow her own increase. This is the feast that I have bid her to, And this the banquet she shall surfeit on; (5.2.18)
William Shakespeare
But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?
Friedrich Nietzsche
If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened-that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?... But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated...'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan,'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'... All that was needed was a series of victories over your own memory.
George Orwell
The past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it’s got no reality, it’s just a set of facts that you’ve learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn’t merely come back to you, you’re actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.
George Orwell
O my brothers, your nobility should not look backward but ahead! Exiles shall you be from all father- and forefather-lands! Your children's land shall you love: this love shall be your new nobility? the undiscovered land in the most distant sea. For that I bid your sails search and search. In your children you shall make up for being the children of your fathers: thus shall you redeem all that is past.
Friedrich Nietzsche
She could hear, some way off, her brothers calling to each other in the woods behind the house. She hoped desperately that their game wouldn't bring them any closer, that they wouldn't scare the birds away. Somehow she knew that you didn't get many moments like this in your life: moments when you knew, without any doubt, that you were alive, when you felt the air in your lungs and the wet grass beneath your feet and the cotton on your skin; moments when you were completely in the present,...
Neil Gaiman
context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one's life. I mean, lets face it:when you're eating simple barbecue under a palm tree, and you feel sand between your toes, samba music is playing softly in the backgroud, waves are lapping at the shore a few yards off, a gentle breeze is cooling the sweat on the back of your neck at the hairline, and looking across the table, past the column of empty Red Stripes at the dreamy expression on your companion's face, you...
Anthony Bourdain