Past Quotes - Page 214

Owning a TVR in the past was like owning a bear. I mean it was great, until it pulled your head off, which it would.

Biology has tended to be an observational science and deriving things from first principles has not been possible in the past but I hate to predict the future on that.

Dogs, for a reason that can only be described as divine, have the ability to forgive, let go of the past, and live each day joyously. It's something the rest of us strive for.

Literary influences are harder for me to point to, because mostly it's a mulch of all of my past reading.

My employer was never at any time aware of anything in my past beyond the writing I did, because, frankly, it isn't relevant to the job I was asked to do, which was to be a reporter.

Memories are not just about the past. They determine our future.

To give a character life in a short space of time, it helps if you arrive on screen with a past.

To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.

Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.

How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?

I respect the British a lot - their history, their past, their culture. I think it's beautiful, what they have with the monarchy.

The past is solid, the future is liquid.

I cannot avoid condemning all those who, from self-conceit have the pretension to imitate great artists of the past. If their powers of emotion be weak, their powers of expression will be likewise.

I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds — with God's help I catch some.

Obviously, I would have been happier if Canada had not been conquered in the past by the English, if this part of North America had remained French, but you can't rewrite history.

I wanted to move away from the disaster airplane movies that we have seen in the past and do something that was more mysterious, and delay until the end the resolution of the mystery, and then have to deal with the plane itself.

Well, once you've resigned yourself to the fact that you are the more mature pop performer and you're past the age you ever thought you would do it, you might as well do it as long as you can. As long as I can still lift a microphone, then I'll do it, you know.

Those of us who obsess over every word and action are constantly recalling past events, but that doesn't make them any less painful, nor does it help us transcend them. To write memoir, you have to not only recollect past events, you have to revisit them. You have to get back to the mental and emotional state you were in during those events.

But as the scissors snip-snapped through her hair and the razor shaved the rest, she realized with a sudden awful panic that she could no longer recall anything from the past. I cannot remember, she whispered to herself. I cannot remember. She's been shorn of memory as brutally as she'd been shorn of her hair, without permission, without reason... Gone, all gone, she thought again wildly, no longer even sure what was gone, what she was mourning.

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.

Everybody likes to go their own way–to choose their own time and manner of devotion.

Native Americans are not and must not be props in a sort of theme park of the past, where we go to have a good time and see exotic cultures. “What we have done to the peoples who were living in North America” is, according to anthropologist Sol Tax, “our Original Sin.

I have great skills. I can fight anybody, anywhere, anytime. I have done it in the past. I am on a different level than everyone else in the game of boxing. Nobody taught me how to fight. I was born a fighter. Everybody else was taught. That is the difference. I would rather show them than talk about it.

Without a doubt, the warming of the past 100 years has been a welcome respite from a long and deadly Little Ice Age. The possibility that humans may have contributed to the recent warming does not make it any less welcome.

One alters the past to form the future but there is a real significance to the pattern which finally appears, which resists all further change.