Past Quotes - Page 221

Like so much of President Obama's decisions over the past six years, this is another photo-op with a compliant press that does not matter and will do little.

Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years. Technologists are providing almost religious visions, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.

When we are in competition with ourselves, and match our todays against our yesterdays, we derive encouragement from past misfortunes and blemishes. Moreover, the competition with ourselves leaves unimpaired our benevolence toward our fellow men.

You can feel very quickly as a prisoner of your past, of the memories.

People who picnic along the public highway leaving a clutter of greasy paper and swill (not a pretty name, but neither is it a pretty object!) for other people to walk or drive past, and to make a breeding place for flies, and furnish nourishment for rats, choose a disgusting way to repay the land-owner for the liberty they took in temporarily occupying his property.

The worst is when someone in your past trumps the person in your present, and you think to yourself: if I'd known this, then maybe I wouldn't have let him go.

One of the things that's exciting for me about this novel is that, to me, Brookland and The Testament of Yves Gundron were both, in certain regards, crypto-steampunk. They're both books that are interested in an alternate technological past that in fact didn't historically come to pass. If you were to ask me what my novels were about, I would say, well, these are novels about technology and how we relate to technology and what technology means.

But there is, I have learned, no permanent escape from the past. It may be an unrecognized law of our nature that we should be drawn back, inevitably, to the place where we have suffered most.

I don't look at myself in the mirror. I'll flash past a mirror in the morning to check how I'm dressed, that's it.

I wasn't just the madwoman in the attic--I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me.

Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.

Parents want their kids’ approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children striving for their parents’ approval.

Few cultures have not produced the idea that in some past era the world ran better than it does now.

The body must be regarded as a site of social, political, cultural and geographical inscriptions, production or constitution. The body is not opposed to culture, a resistant throwback to a natural past; it is itself a cultural, the cultural product.

A woman who occupies the same realm of thought with man, who can explore with him the depths of science, comprehend the steps of progress through the long past and prophesy those of the momentous future, must ever be surprised and aggravated with his assumptions of leadership and superiority, a superiority she never concedes, an authority she utterly repudiates.

Unless you can muse in a crowd all day On the absent face that fixed you; Unless you can love, as the angels may, With the breadth of heaven betwixt you; Unless you can dream that his faith is fast, Through behoving and unbehoving; Unless you can die when the dream is past — Oh, never call it loving!

The criminal is not alone when he returns to the scene of the crime; he is joined there by his victim, and both are driven by the same curiosity: to relive that moment which stamped past and future for each.

At any age it does us no harm to look over our past shortcomings and plan to improve our characters and actions in the coming year.

A woman fallen has no future; a man risen has no past.

It's one of the greatest honors I could ever imagine - to be able to represent my country and to be able to wear "USA" on my back. It's an incredible honor. It's an accomplishment of the past four year but of a life of dreaming and working hard and doing everything I can in pursuit of this goal.

We meet ourselves at every turn In the long country of the past.

Neverland is a place where you don't grow up, then you have to confront your past.

We all come from someplace. We didn't just get here by accident. Where we come from has got to be known, if you want to know where you are and who you are. You cannot understand the present without understanding the past, especially when it comes to family.