Valerie June Quotes

It keeps me humble just to know exactly where I came from and all the hard work I had to put in to be here. It feels good to reminisce about the past.

Vegas is like the old definition of writing: though I don't enjoy writing, I love having written. Though I didn't enjoy Vegas, I love having lived there.

God was awfully good to me during the good days. I cherish the old days, but I don't miss them.

The past is the past, but if you're overanalyzing or trying to repeat it, you're gonna get stuck. I just had a wonderful youth, and I loved everything about it, so I really try and hang on to it.

People are always talking about the old days. They say that the old movies were better, that the old actors were so great. But I don't think so. All I can say about the old days is that they have passed.

It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.

I do love the past but wouldn't want to live in it.

All great people glorify their history and look back upon their early attainments with a spiritualized vision.

Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.

It's always been the ones that got away that stick in your memory. You use them for motivation. The ones you win are brilliant and you enjoy them, and then you move on.

We all get motivated differently and I think as you get older, you'd be foolish not to draw on your experiences from the past.

I wouldn't change the past for nothing.

There is maybe a danger of dwelling on the past, but I think that's far less dangerous than moving forward without learning and not being able to find joy in happy memories and things like that.

I had drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret, which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past is an absolute waste of time, that we should always look forward and not backward, and that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets.

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.

We're all just memories of our future selves.

Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age

One is inspired only in solitude.

It's okay to look back, just don't stare.

The success [of Mary Kay Inc.] is much, much deeper than just dollars and cents and buildings and assets. The real success of our Company is measured to me in the lives that have been touched and given hope.

I will never, ever regret the things I've done. Because most days, all you have are places in your memory that you can go to.

This kid [Janks Morton, Jr.] was so special, although he's not a kid anymore, obviously, but he was there from day one of my rise through boxing. You know how the years go by and then, when you stop to reflect, you realize that someone was a part of your whole evolution as an individual? That's what I share with Junior.

As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.

Knowing what I know about the people who have come before me, and the people who came before them, and what they had to do, it changes my capacity to stay engaged, to stay productive.

Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.