Roger Zelazny Quotes

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

[M]emory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.

Cassandra wondered at the mind's cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life's end, her grandmother's head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was it always this way? Did those with passage booked on death's silent ship always scan the dock for faces of the long-departed?

The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.

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

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.

I was born in 1949 - which seems like a long time ago... Actually, it is a long time ago, when I think about it.

There is no fence nor hedge round time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it if you can remember.

I just find that there's something about looking back on interviews, whether for purposes of remembering what I said about something or if it's for posterity when I'm 75.

I do enjoy thinking about the past.

I write - so it would seem - to recapture, to preserve and return to the past, though I might just as easily be writing to forget and put that past behind me.

Memory is the best of all gardens. Therein, winter and summer, the seeds of their past lie dormant, ready to spring into instant bloom at any moment the mind wishes to bring them to life.

Strange, what brings these past things so vividly back to us, sometimes!

Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.

The older you get the more you live in the past

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

The memory is perpetually looking back when we have nothing present to entertain us. It is like those repositories in animals that are filled with food, on which they may ruminate when their present pastures fail.

I thought of the future, and spoke of the past.

[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.

You don't need a time machine if you know how to remember.

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.

Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.

The Past is such a curious Creature To look her in the Face A Transport may receipt us Or a Disgrace-.

I write a lot about the past because I really see things clearly in hindsight.