John Fowles Quotes

The past is dead except for the life you give it

The past is one evil less and one memory more.

You can't live in nostalgia-land.

I can't really dwell on the past.

People try to keep their past, like kind of holding on to their past. Every Springsteen song talks about that.

I had learned one of the bitter lessons of life: never try to regain the past, the fire will have become ashes.

Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees ... one's happiness, one's reality?

Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it.

Your past is just that, the past, a place within your psyche with no more reality to it then the picture of a castle on a postcard is made from stone.

My yesterdays are all boxed up and neatly put away.

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.

There is no distance on this earth as far away as yesterday.

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

The past is not a package one can lay away.

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

There's no future in our past. Just experience. We want to return to it, but we don't want to close the door on it either.

It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures.

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

The past is a great place and I don't want to erase it or to regret it, but I don't want to be its prisoner either.

I hate looking backward, but every once in a while it sneaks up on you.

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

There's no sustenance in the past.

I don't like to dwell on the past.

I don't really look into the past too much.

I don't like to look too far back into the past.