124 Quotes About Past-and-future

Moonless nights haunt me. They evoke remembrances of a carefree life when I dreamed without doubt to what my future could be. I yearn for a time when my mother’s tree swayed beneath the dusk like an amber sea, but the past is locked without a key. Never to return—only flee

From inside the tavern came the sounds of a fiddle being tuned, various plucks and tentative bowings, then a slow and groping attempt at Aura Lee, interrupted every few notes by unplanned squeaks and howls. Nevertheless the beautiful and familiar tune was impervious to poor performance, and Inman thought how painfully young it sounded, as if the pattern of its notes allowed no room to imagine a future clouded and tangled and diminished.

Although I am no longer caught in the past, the future seems like a ridiculous thing to me. Try to catch it, hold it in your hand. It disappears every time.

We spend too much time either imagining the future, that vast expanse of unborn possibility, or else wandering the past, the land of the dead. And yet I return there, again and again, as if watching it unfold in my memory can affect the outcome. As if the past could ever be as changeable as the future.

Sometimes we can’t be present to the possibilities of our future until we navigate a peaceful path through the aftermath of our past.

Our future is just a past yet to arrive, our past a future come and gone.

We can’t do anything to improve our past, but we can learn from it to improve our future.

The distant past is always beautiful, and the future is a dance of fear and fortune.

Algunos de esos fragmentos presentaban rasguños, lo que indicaba que habían sucedido. Los detalles estaban frescos, pero las emociones habían desaparecido sin dejar rastro. El pasado era como un puñado de arena que creías estar aferrando con fuerza, pero que ya se había escapado entre los dedos. La memoria era un río largo tiempo seco, dejando solo guijarros dispersos en su lecho sin vida.