Yes, I have inherited the past because I have acknowledged it at last† And, now that I have come to understand it, I no longer need to look back.

-Ackroyd, Peter
  English Music, ch.19.

There is always something rather absurd about the past.

-Beerbohm, Sir (Henry) Max(imilian)
  TheYellow Book, vol.4

I want a future that will live up to my past.

-Bennett, Alan
  Spoken by Maggie Smith as  Joyce Chilvers in  A Private Function.

He who desires and acts not, breeds pestilence.

-Blake,William
  The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,'Proverbs of Hell'.

One of the reasons why old people make so many journeys into the past isto satisfy themselves that it isstill there.

-Blythe, Ronald George
  The View in Winter, introduction.

It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.

-Butler, Samuel
Erewhon Revisited, ch.14.

To begin to live in the present, we must first atone forour past and be finished with it, and we can onlyatone for it by suffering, by extraordinary, unceasing exertion.

-Chekhov, Anton
  The Cherry Orchard, act 2 (translated by Elisaveta Fen). English    colonial    administrator,    Governor    of    Queensland (1905^9)  and  of  New  South Wales  (1909^13), Viceroy  of  India (1916^21) and First Lord of the Admiralty (1924).

The past was nothing to her† The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant.

-Chopin, Kate (Katherine) ne¤  e  O'Flaherty
  The Awakening, ch.15.

No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last 25 years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it, but all that fades away before the spectacle that is now unfolding. The past, with its crimes, its follies, and its tragedies, flashes away.I seethe Russian soldiersstanding on thethreshold of their native land, guarding the fields that their fathers have tilled from time immemorial. Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid. Any man or state who marches with Hitler is our foe.

-Churchill, Lord Randolph Henry Spencer
Radio broadcast on the German invasionof Russia, 22  Jun.

The present is the funeral of the past, And man the living sepulchre of life.

-Clare,John
  'The Present is the Funeral of the Past'.

Education is impossible without love, without loving a few of the great men of the past.

-Desbiens,Jean-Paul
  For Pity's Sake (translated by Fre¤  de¤  ric Co"   te).

Psychology has a long past, but onlya short history.

-Ebbinghaus, Hermann
  Summary of Psychology.

Let us draw an arrow arbitrarily. If as we follow the arrow we find more and more of the random element in the world, then the arrow is pointing towards the future; if therandomelement decreasesthearrow pointstowards the past† I shall usethe phrase'time's arrow'to express this one-way property of time which has no analogue in space.

-Eddington, SirArthur Stanley
  The Nature of the Physical World, ch.4. Martin  Amis used the phrase'Time's  Arrow' for the title of his1991novel.

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past.

-Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)
  Four Quartets,'Burnt Norton', pt.1.

And right action is freedom From past and future also.

-Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)
Four Quartets,'The Dry Salvages', pt.5.

Here the impossible union Of spheres of existence is actual, Here the past and future Are conquered, and reconciled.

-Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)
Four Quartets,'The Dry Salvages', pt.5.

This is the use of memory: For liberationönot less of love but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the future as well as the past.

-Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)
  Four Quartets,'Little Gidding', pt.3.

Le colonialisme ne se satisfait pas d'enserrer le peuple dans ses mailles, de vider le cerveau colonise¤   de toute forme et de tout contenu. Par une sorte de perversion de la logique, il s'oriente vers le passe¤   du peuple opprime¤  , le distort, le de¤  figure, l'ane¤  antit. Colonialismisnot satisfiedmerely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. Bya kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.

-Fanon, Frantz Omar
Les Damne¤  s de la terre ( The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington,1965), ch.4,'On National Culture'.

There, I believed, lay the greatest secrets of the past yet preserved inour world of today.Ihad cometotheturn of the road; and for better or worse I chose the forest path. 319

-Fawcett, Percy Harrison
  Of South  America. Collected in Brian Fawcett (ed) Exploration Fawcett (1953).

   Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedesbeforeus.It eludedusthen, but that's no matteröto-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further† And one fine morning† So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

-Fitzgerald, F(rancis) Scott Key
  The Great Gatsby, ch.9.