Robert Silverberg Quotes

…she remembered watching a summer sunset from this very spot. Not so long ago; just a lifetime.

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?

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

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

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.

Perhaps even these things, one day, will be pleasing to remember.

To me, my house is always recreating what I lost in youth.

A lot of times as an actor you watch a film it's like thumbing through a photo book from your past. It's people you haven't seen in a while, there are people that have passed away, and there are people you owe phone calls to.

When I remember bygone days I think how evening follows morn So many I loved were not yet dead, So many I love were not yet born.

We all have appointments with the past.

In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom, especially if it has got to be carried into the market.

Friends depart, and memory takes them To her caverns, pure and deep.

I drift along, thinking about the past a great deal. The past is so reliable, so delightful, and the best place to live. I end up there quite often, you know; it's very comfortable and dependable.

One of the reasons why old people make so many journeys into the past is to satisfy themselves that it is still there.

The past scampers like an alley cat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter.

I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.

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.

I was looking at the photographs and I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories.

If it’s time to go, remember what you’re leaving. Remember the best.

This is the place. Stand still, my steed,- Let me review the scene, And summon from the shadowy past The forms that once have been.

Clothing is . . . an exercise in memory. It makes me explore the past: how did I feel when I wore that. They are like signposts in the search for the past.

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.

[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 can revisit - the wonderful thing about my job is you can revisit your 22-year-old self or your 24-year-old self any particular night you want. The songs pick up some extra resonance, I hope, but they're still - they're there, and I can revisit that period of my life when I choose. So it's quite a nice experience.