Eric Ripert Quotes

Traditionally, photography is supposed to capture an event that has passed; but that is not what I'm looking for. Photography brings the past into the present when you look at it.

Yesterday's the past, tomorrow's the future, but today is a gift. That's why it's called the present.

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

Don't squander beautiful moments by always trying to snap the perfect picture or record the event on film. Sometimes it's better to watch things as they happen with your own eyes, knowing that the memory of the experience will always be with you.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

So much of memory comes from the beginning of our lives when we know the world for the first time with a kind of clarity. It is that discovery of the past in the present on which a writer depends again and again as if our lost childhoods, like the surprising cyclamen plant, are forever opening new blossoms.

Legends are all to do with the past and nothing to do with the present.

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.

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

I think memory is essential to what we are. If we - we wouldn't be able to talk to each other without memory. And what we think of as the present really is the past. It is made out of the past.

Whenever we're having a great time, we're already anticipating the day when we will remember this great time. Many of us live in that unreal area between the past, the present, and the future.

Taste refers to the past, imagination to the future.

Life moves so fast. You gotta document the good times, man.

Happiness in the present is only shattered by comparison with the past.

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.

Who controls the present controls the past. There's a power structure, if you like, between the present and the past and the future, and that's what I'm interested in.

We can invent only with memory.

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

Pick the day. Enjoy it - to the hilt. The day as it comes. People as they come... The past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present - and I don't want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future.

I'm living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.

The present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost.

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.

A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don't find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.