Past, The
Past, The
See Also: HISTORY, MEMORY
- Events … had receded so swiftly into the near-forgotten past, like a movie seen years before and dimly remembered —Harvey Swados
- The events [of the past] were astir in me, like the loosening phlegm in an attack of bronchitis, waiting to come up —L. P. Hartley
- Felt himself sliding … back into a bumpy past where old humiliations still waited to confront him like hills grown taller with the dust of years —Helen Hudson
- Going back is like lifting elephants with your teeth —Paul West
- He [Sherwood Anderson] carried his childhood like a hurt warm bird held to his middle-aged breast —Herbert Gold
- Her past years washed away like so many ridges of sand at high tide —Peter Meinke
- Inheritance, like grace, is something you deserve —Hollis Summers
The inheritance being compared to grace is family achievement.
- It was like those years were just a ghost town she’d walked through and then decided to forget —Lee Smith
- Kept coming back like a song —J. W. Rider
- Like a ball of wool that kittens have got at … all the disposed-of process of my past unravelled on the floor —Louis MacNeice
- The man who has not anything to boast of but his illustrious ancestors is like a potato … the only good belonging to him is under ground —Sir Thomas Overbury
- Our past … clings to us like strange mystical lint —W. P. Kinsella
- The past … always affected her eyes like salt water. It filled her head as if she had stayed underwater too long —Susan Fromberg Schaeffer
- The past, as steep as stone, wider than water, like all land and ocean stretches —Archibald MacLeish
- Past and future lie joined like a lunatic serpent —Robert Silverberg
- The past … held him like a pain —Wallace Stegner
- The past is a bucket of ashes —Carl Sandburg
- The past is like a funeral gone by —Edmond Gosse
- The past lies like an Alp upon the mind —Delmore Schwartz
- Past … like a burnt book —Lynne Sharon Schwartz
- The past, like an inspired rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations with her harmony —Percy Bysshe Shelley
- The past was drumming, like a train coming nearer and nearer, in her head —V. S. Pritchett
- A record as long as your arm —George Garrett
The simile is the title of a short story.
- Rolled up his past like a carpet —Anon
- The sense of accummulated riches of time and tradition pressed past him like a crowd moving in rank after rank, through unending centuries —G. K. Chesterton
- Sometimes I want to go back to everything I had, as in a museum —Yehuda Amichai
- She wears her past like other women wear perfume —Anon ambassador about Nora Astorga of Nicaragua, New York Times Magazine, September 28, 1986
True to form, the simile was pulled out of the article and used as the caption for the main illustration.
- Sloughed off my past … like a skin that shuns the light of day —Natascha Wodin
- The thoughts of my past life rise like the ghosts of an unquiet dream —Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Treated his past gingerly as if it were unfriendly to him —Jean Garrigue
- Where she has been, she drags behind her, heavy and slurred as the speech of the deaf —Lisa Ress
- Worrying about the past is like trying to make birth control pills retroactive —Joey Adams
See Also: USELESSNESS