A man cannot free himself from the past more easily than he can from his own body.
~André Maurois

The past is not a package one can lay away.
~Emily Dickinson

Praises for our past triumphs are as feathers to a dead bird.
~Paul Eldridge

The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it.
~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
~Lesley P. Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953

The Past lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.
~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables

The one charm of the past is that it is the past.
~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
~Wendell Berry

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.
~Virginia Woolf

Look not at the days gone by with a forlorn heart. They were simply the dots we can now connect with our present, to help us draw the outline of a beautiful tomorrow.
~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

I find in old age that it's possible to revisit the past, the one requirement being that you come as you are.
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Bring the past only if you are going to build from it.
~Doménico Cieri Estrada

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.
~Golda Meir

God has no power over the past except to cover it with oblivion.
~Pliny the Elder

We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
~John Cage

What you need to know about the past is that no matter what has happened, it has all worked together to bring you to this very moment. And this is the moment you can choose to make everything new. Right now.
~Author Unknown