Past Quotes - Page 419

I usually start with a big question, such as whether people today are happier than in the past, or why men have dominated women in most human societies. And then I follow the question instead of trying to follow my own answer, even if it means I can't formulate any clear theory.

The Mars Rover sent back stunning photos [last week] indicating the past presence of water. The pictures show tiny splotches of blue on the Red Planet. The other theory is that the satellite dish on the rover accidentally picked up CNN's election coverage.

Our reliance in this country is on the inquiring, individual human mind. Our strength is founded there; our resilience, our ability to face an ever-changing future and to master it. We are not frozen into the backward-facing impotence of those societies, fixed in the rigidness of an official dogma, to which the future is the mirror of the past. We are free to make the future for ourselves.

U.S. Speedskating has been riddled with problems since when I started my career, and we were always able to look past that. When it came down to performing on the ice, regardless of funding issues, we were always able to make it happen. And that's what it's all about.

Figure out where you are on the field. If you're past 15 or so yards, the ball is going down the field. When you're in great position, you're able to control the receiver.

I'm a product of older filmmakers I guess, the past where you get to make movies and scenes are what they are.

For the past few years I have engaged in several inappropriate conversations conducted over Twitter, Facebook, e-mail and occasionally on the phone with women I have met online.

Little bits of things make me do it; — perhaps a word that I said and ought not to have said ten years ago; — the most ordinary little mistakes, even my own past thoughts to myself about the merest trifles. They are always making me shiver.

Men will love to the last, but they love what is fresh and new. A woman's love can live on the recollection of the past, and cling to what is old and ugly.

The past is dead, and nothing that we can choose to believe about it can harm or benefit those who were alive in it. On the other hand, it has the power to harm us.

I think the combatant is always burdened with returning and making his way through his past. And that we as citizens have a responsibility to those guys upon return. We have to make some kind of an attempt to understand what their life is like.

The BFI exists to celebrate all poets of world cinema, of the past and present.

If you beat someone with a good name, of course some people are going to say he's past his prime, he's washed up, or he shouldn't be fighting. You're always going to have critics. It doesn't matter what the outcome is, whether it be good or whether it be bad.

Personally, I am stuck with one foot in the past and one foot in the present.

In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.

In Britain, journalists often view comparisons with our society going back two, three, or seven centuries as more relevant than comparisons going back two, three, or seven decades. Drunkenness centuries ago is more illuminating than comparative sobriety 30 years ago. The distant past, selectively mined for evidence that justifies our current conduct, becomes more important than living memory.

Norman Mailer described the desire to be cool as a "decision to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention.

If I'm in Rome for only 48 hours, I would consider it a sin against God to not eat cacio e pepe, the most uniquely Roman of pastas, in some crummy little joint where Romans eat. I'd much rather do that than go to the Vatican. That's Rome to me.

It's hard to tell how far women's individuality has come in the past twenty years.

Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.

Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire.

Yet I saw crypts when I looked at him, and I heard the beat of kettledrums. I saw torchlit fields where I had never been, heard vague incantations, felt the heat of raging fires on my face. And they didn't come out of him, these visions. Rather I drew them out on my own. Yet I never had Nicolas, mortal or immortal, been so alluring. Never had Gabrielle held me so in thrall. Dear God, this is love. This is desire. And all my past amours have been but the shadow of this." — Lestat de Lioncourt

You think I live in the past. You don't understand that I actually change with every era, I always have as best I can

I wonder how often in the past I may have missed the good in people because I pre-judged, based on the differences?

Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history.