Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable.

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

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

The past is not a package one can lay away.

Remembrance of things past.

I do enjoy thinking about the past.

We all have appointments with the past.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.

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

History could hover, like a faint perfume or a memory stamped on the back of one's eyelids.

The past is a bucket of ashes

The Past -- the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf --the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out 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.

I am not a historian. I am a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past

Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago,“ has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday.

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

The only thing simple about the past is that it's not now.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

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

What's gone will never come back, but it exists when you think of it.

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

The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.

In memory, you can access something from the past, anything that you've experienced that you remember - it's there. Now, you might have a memento of it in a photograph or in a film or a building or some clothes that you wore. There might be something that connects you to this memory. But all of us are just all caught in this time, whatever that is.