Philip Roth Quotes

It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out.

Your past is always your past. Even if you forget it, it remembers you.

The future is always here in the past

I still preserve those relics of past sufferings and experience, like pillars of witness set up in travelling through the valve of life, to mark particular occurrences. The footsteps are obliterated now; the face of the country may be changed; but the pillar is still there, to remind me how all things were when it was reared.

We live in reference to past experience and not to future events, however inevitable.

Your past is your shadow. It has form but no substance, except in the places you allow it to touch you. (

I've been a foreigner for the past twenty years. I don't have roots anymore. My roots are in my memory and my writing. That's why memory is so important. Who are you but what you can remember?

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.

The past is not dead; it is not even past. People live on inner time; the moment in which a decisive thought or feeling takes place can be at any time. Timeless feelings are common to all of us.

The past is no farther away than your pillow.

If it seems like I've been lost in 'lets remember', If it seems I'm gettin' older and missin' my younger days, well you shoulda known me much better, cause the past is something that never got in my way.

All whispers and echoes from a past that is gone teem into the sleeper's brain, and he is with them, and part of them.

The part I remember best is the beginning.

Who we are in the present includes who we were in the past.

Old age likes to dwell in the recollections of the past, and, mistaking, the speedy march of years, often is inclined to take the prudence of the winter time for a fat wisdom of, midsummer days. Manhood is bent to the passing cares of the passing moment, and holds so closely to his eyes the sheet of, "to-day," that it screens the "to-morrow" from his sight.

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling ,and sewn with rebus threads.Most of the time , the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on .

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.

The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.

Music is the way our memories sing to us across time.

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?

Though one cannot always Remember exactly why one has been happy, There is no forgetting that one was.

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.

After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?