The past is a distraction, a source of envy, enmity, bitterness. Only the present matters, for only in the present can we shape the future.Cut loose the past; it is dead weight.Let the Extirpation continue. Let it never end.

Although one may direct the future or past through the onerous linkages of temporal cause and effect, riding the breaking waves of the present and never once overstepping it, the better way is to go there and do it yourself.

Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there.

Because that is what happens when you try to run from the past. It doesn't just catch up: it overtakes, blotting out the future, the landscape, the very sky, until there is no path left except that which leads through it.

Most of us assume that human beings have free will. However, . . . [we] are very much conditioned by our species, culture, family, and by the past in general. . . . It is rare for a human being to have free will. . . . (140)

Emptying the ashtrays was very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labeled ‘the past,’ and having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue.

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

The paradox is that, while a concern with past and future is obviously central to psychological functioning, to behave as though one were indeed in the past or future, as many do, pollutes the lively possibilities of existence.

A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don't find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.

This is because the Greeks had it backward, and no matter how hard humans try thinking otherwise, they still think like Greeks. For the Greeks, when you looked ahead all you saw was the past. It was like the past was the future.

You must confront your past. At some time or other you must confront your past. It doesn't flash before your eyes, I knew that, but it's always there. We are our past. There is nothing else, and none of it can be undone.

Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.

He looked at the silver pocketknife in his hand. An idea came to him – possibly the stupidest, craziest idea he’d had since he thought, Hey, I’ll get Percy to swim in the River Styx! He’ll love me for that!

we can gain experience from the past, but we cant relive it. But we can hope for the future, Its always along side us, on the inside of us looking out. The past should not be allowed to evaporate but should exist only in memories.

But bid life seize the present? It lives less in the present Than in the future always, And less in both together Than in the past. The present Is too much for the senses, Too crowding, too confusing— Too present to imagine.