Bernhard Schlink Quotes

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

I don't really look into the past too much.

We all have appointments with the past.

All our tastes are but reminiscences.

Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that

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.

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.

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

I wanted to write what I remembered to be true.

I hate looking backward, but every once in a while it sneaks up on you.

I'm not into watching stuff I did last week, let alone three or four years ago.

It's hard to watch something you've done many years ago.

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

There is no fence nor hedge round time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it if you can remember.

I find it hard to focus looking forward. So I look backward.

People try to keep their past, like kind of holding on to their past. Every Springsteen song talks about that.

I just find that there's something about looking back on interviews, whether for purposes of remembering what I said about something or if it's for posterity when I'm 75.

I've given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.

I'm not particularly fond of the past, but I do ramble on about it quite a bit.

The fragments for the past, for me, are not without life.

I think you save things from your past that you don't quite understand, and you put them in a box, and you save them for later until you can unwrap them and try to understand what they meant.

I don't like to look too far back into the past.

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

I do enjoy thinking about the past.