Dee Rees Quotes

I'm always thinking about time. That's one of themes I return to in my work, the way the past bears on the present, the way that time is not linear, and how that expresses itself in people's everyday lives.

There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.

The future continues to preoccupy me as a reliable source of hopes, fears and anxieties, but increasingly the present seems to have no outstanding qualities of its own, being merely a way-station through which events travel to the vast shadow lands of the past.

People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have.

The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present.

The present is a point just passed.

Time is an illusion. Time only exists when we think about the past and the future. Time doesn't exist in the present here and now.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

Yesterday is but today's memory, and tomorrow is today's dream.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.

You can never figure out what the future sounds like. As soon as you make it, it's the past.

The present moment dies every moment to become the past , is reborn every moment into the future. All experience is now. Now never ends.

There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again.

The Past, the Future, O dear, is from you; you should regard both these as one.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

Today is always here,' said Sethe. 'Tomorrow, never.

this present moment never comes to be and it never ceases to be, it is simply our minds that construct the continuity of thoughts we call time. In the present moment is nirvana.

We think very little of time present; we anticipate the future, as being too slow, and with a view to hasten it onward, we recall the past to stay it as too swiftly gone. We are so thoughtless, that we thus wander through the hours which are not here, regardless only of the moment that is actually our own.

The future is an infinite succession of presents.

The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich.

Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.

Time is a sandpile we run our fingers in.

Oh if life were made of moments Even now and then a bad one--! But if life were only moments, Then you'd never know you had one.

Tomorrow! - Why, tomorrow I may be Myself with yesterday's sev'n thousand years.