Robert Silverberg Quotes

The future will soon be a thing of the past.

We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories. Some take us forward, they're called dreams.

Call us the future from your past.

My wife says that my tombstone will read, 'Here lies Mr.C, who used to be Mr.B.' So I think that's probably what I'll be remembered for.

The future's come and gone; it's a thing of the past. That once impossibly exotic expression 'the year 2000,' for so long evocative of silver suits and robots in pinnies, now feels antiquated.

Lest when I am gone you may be at a loss for an epitaph for me, let me give you one - He Fed Fevers.

I did once answer the question 'What would you say on your tombstone?' I know what I would say: 'Mario Cuomo, 1932 - dash,' and, 'He tried.' That's it.

I awake with a not entirely sickened knowledge that I am merely young again and in a funny way at peace, an observer who is aware of time's chariot, aware that some metamorphosis has occurred.

I never thought I'd live this long. It sounds funny because I still think of myself as a kid.

I only remember the future.

Time travel is a fantasy we all have. The 'Back to the Future' series really exploits that wish.

We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward, are dreams.

Remember the past - and await the future.

I picture my epitaph: 'Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.

Did not one spend the first half of one's days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?

We're all just memories of our future selves.

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

My epitaph? My epitaph will be, 'Curiosity did not kill this cat'.

Someone, I tell you, in another time will remember us

You should never fall in love with your own press clippings, because it is very much the nature of the beast that the same journalists who build you up between Monday and Friday tear you down for weekend fun...My family's habit of living in the past seems to me pathological, even dangerous. If all greatness lies in the past, what is the point of the future?

I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

...if I die suddenly, my gravestone might appropriately offer this insight into my departure: "God got tired." I require lots of work.

There is a past which is gone forever, but there is a future which is still our own.

The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.

That's why we have memory. And the opposite of memory— hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can built off our pasts and make future.