Frances Mayes Quotes

That's a part of me going back to what I used to do.

I want to visit Memory Lane, I don't want to live there.

We all have appointments with the past.

All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.

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.

Having lost our present and our future, we had of necessity to bend all our endeavors to the past, which no one could take from us if only we were vigilant enough.

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

I keep my scrapbooks in the car. When I come to a stoplight, I start looking through my past. Sometimes I wish the red lights were longer.

Don't time travel into the past, roaming through the nuances as if they can change. Don't bookmark pages you've already read.

You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!

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

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?

I look at the past and I see myself.

Remember the past - and await the future.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

We're captive on the carousel of time, we can't return we can only look behind.

The past is one evil less and one memory more.

This is what I have come to know: Our past is never passed and there is no such thing as moving on. But there is this telling and there is such a thing as passing through.

These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past

The past is never where you think you left it.

Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.

We're all just memories of our future selves.

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

Things you did. Things you never did. Things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.

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.