present

...the wounds of the past and the scars of the present don't disfigure me in your eyes - because you know the price I pay for loving you ...

The danger of restorative nostalgia lies in its belief that the mutilated 'wholeness' of the body politic can be repaired. But the reflective nostalgic understands deep down that loss is irrecoverable: Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world. In pop terms, Morrissey is the supreme poet of reflective nostalgia.

Learn from your past and shut the door behind to live in present.Our past is just like a dry rose which was once a rose with all colors of life, with sweet fragrance, with soft petal, with thorns but now it is left with only thorns which could still hurt.

Our past is the forge upon which we are hardened and tempered, to prepare us for the present. We are like a fine blade that must be hammered into shape before it can be ready to make its finest cuts.

The past is important for all the information and wisdom it holds. But you can get lost in it. You've got to learn to keep the knowledge of the past with you as you pursue the present.

The present is the key to the past.

the past is so hard to shift. It comes with us like a chaperon, standing between us and the newness of the present - the new chance.

Do you know that I love now to recall and visit at certain dates the places where Iwas once happy in my own way? I love to build up my present in harmony with the irrevocable past...

The simultaneity of near and far confused me; I thought it possible to find the past, the present and the future united in one place, giving it all that life can hold; but I had grave doubts that at any given moment life might reign both here and there, on this side and that side of the seas and mountains. And such doubts, demanding resolution, may have inspired earliest journeys: I went forth, not to learn what fear was but to test what the names held and feel their magic in the flesh, just as, at the open window, you feel the miraculous power of the sun you'd long seen reflected on distant hills and spread on dewy meadows.

Tis the old wind in the old anger,But then it threshed another wood.

I felt like I was living two lives. One in the present and one in the past.

There is no past. Past is present when you carry it with you.

My fascination with history is as much about the present as it is about the past.

You can never go back to a specific moment. That's why it's important to live in the present and not the past. Don't let foolish memories get in the way of the makings of new ones.

Everyone__ past has ways of sneaking up on them. You just have to be in a place in the present that you__e strong enough to deal with when your past comes to visit.

My life's a tangle of past and present, like two separate puzzles with their pieces tumbled together. Nothing fits.

Faculty X is simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore and Lhasa and Stepney Green are all as real as the place I happen to be in at the moment. Yet my senses do not agree. They assure me that this place, here and now, is far more real than any other place or any other time. Only in certain moments of great inner intensity do I know this to be a lie. Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it _ fragmentary and uncertain though it is _ that distinguishes man from all other animals

To use the past to justify the present is bad enough__ut it__ just as bad to use the present to justify the past.