Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jeffrey Eugenides

Though at this moment she felt abused, abandoned, and ashamed of herself, Madeleine knew that she was still young, that she had her whole life ahead of her--a life in which, if she persevered, she might do something special--and that part of persevering meant getting past moments just like this one, when people made you feel small, unlovable, and took away your confidence.

Jill McCorkle

The silver friend knows your present and the gold friend knows all of your past dirt and glories. Once in a blue moon there is someone who knows it all, someone who knows and accepts you unconditionally, someone who is there for life.

Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.

Jesse Helms

This bill attempts to make sure that President Clinton is not allowed to do by Executive Order what Congress has declined to enact in the past two congressional sessions namely, to treat homosexuals as a special class protected under various titles of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Jennifer Lawrence

I get photographers hiding in my bushes. We're way past autographs. We're into being stalked and followed.

Jennifer Lawrence

If you don't look like an airbrushed model ... you have to look past it. You look how you look. What are you going to do?

Jennifer Lopez

In the past, love for me has always meant forever, and sure, you still nurse some of those fantasies, but I don't try to force it anymore. I hung on to my fairy-tale ideals for a long time. But where I am now, what I've been through, there are no rules. There are lots of ways it can turn out instead of just one. There are so many different kinds of happiness, not just the one you learned about when you were 5 years old.

Jeffrey Tate

I was told when I went for a life-insurance exam when I was 18 that I was not likely to live past 50, so I refused to pay the premium.

Jean Chretien

Obviously, I would have been happier if Canada had not been conquered in the past by the English, if this part of North America had remained French, but you can't rewrite history.

James C. Collins

It's more important than ever to define yourself in terms of what you stand for rather than what you make, because what you make is going to become outmoded faster than it has at any time in the past. ...hang on to the idea of who you are as a company, and focus not on what you do, but on what you could do. By being really clear about what you stand for and why you exist, you can see what you could do with a much more open mind. You enhance your ability to adapt to change.

James Cameron

Your only competitors are your past achievements.

James A. Garfield

We hold reunions, not for the dead, for there is nothing in all the earth that you and I can do for the dead. They are past our help and past our praise. We can add to them no glory, we can give to them no immortality. They do not need us, but forever and forever more we need them.

James A. Baldwin

The past is what makes the present coherent, and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

James A. Baldwin

The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.

James A. Baldwin

To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

Jacques Yves Cousteau

The idea of a group of elders is that, in past civilizations, they have linked worlds; the other world was also present in this one. There is also the argument that elders have "experience." The problem is that experience teaches fear of change. Experience kills imagination. Experience makes people conservative. What we are facing tomorrow requires the force of imagination, not wisdom from yesterday.

Jackie Stewart

It takes leadership to improve safety. And I started off the movement in my time, but the person who has done more over the past 20 to 30 years and who has led it is Professor Sid Watkins.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee

For me it's the challenge -- the challenge to try to beat myself or do better than I did in the past. I try to keep in mind not what I have accomplished but what I have to try to accomplish in the future.

Jackie Kennedy

Americans care about their past, but for short term gain they ignore it and tear down everything that matters.

Christopher Lasch

A society that has made 'nostalgia' a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.

Christopher Lasch

The prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself.

Christopher Isherwood

But now isn’t simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until — later of sooner — perhaps — no, not perhaps — quite certainly: it will come.

Christopher Isherwood

The past is just something that's over.

George Harrison

It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. All there is ever, is the now.

George Harrison

If a car comes past me in a traffic jam with a boom box going, I jump out of my skin. Those big booming basses. I'm just more sensitive to noise these days.

George Harrison

The Past is gone and the future might not even be, the only thing we ever experience is the now, I try to enjoy the minute.

George Harrison

They used us as an excuse to go mad and then blamed it on us. Gandhi says create and preserve the image of your choice. The image of my choice is not Beatle George - those who want that can go and see Wings. Why live in the past? Be here now.

Gaston Bachelard

The poetic image […] is not an echo of the past. On the contrary: through the brilliance of any image, the distant past resounds with echoes.

Gaston Bachelard

Words, in their distant past, have the past of my reveries.

Gaston Bachelard

The past of the soul is so distant! The soul does not live on the edge of time. It finds its rest in the universe imagined by reverie.

Gary Zukav

Your experiences are not limited to what you have created in the past

Gary Burton

I've discovered all kinds of music and done all kinds of music over the past 40 years, from playing tango with Piazzolla to all the different bands I've had.

Gary Becker

The Treatise tries to analyze not only modern Western families, but also those in other cultures and the changes in family structure during the past several centuries.