Virginia Woolf Quotes

My first memory was of stories about the past - a past that, according to the storytellers, was superior in every way to the life then being lived. It didn't take me long, however, to understand that the present was all we had, for the past was gone, and nothing could be done about it.

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

Don't time travel into the past, roaming through the nuances as if they can change. Don't bookmark pages you've already read.

The future continues to preoccupy me as a reliable source of hopes, fears and anxieties, but increasingly the present seems to have no outstanding qualities of its own, being merely a way-station through which events travel to the vast shadow lands of the past.

We have to keep an eye on the future with a sense of the past in every passing moment of the present.

I think the beautiful thing about the past is that it leads you to the present.

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

My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image.

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

I'm the last person to ask 'what do you remember' from a particular time period... I like to learn from the past... not 'live' in it.

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

History never looks like history when you are living through it.

I guess I'm living in the present more than the past.

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

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

People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have.

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.

Human's can't live in the present as animals do; they just live in the present. But human's are always thinking about the future or the past.

What I find compelling is the moment in which people realize, with suffering and pain, that in the past there was a time when they were happy, because back then the present and the future coincided - they were one and the same thing.

The past is where its supposed to be.

If the future, as imagined in literature, is really the present taken to extremes, then the past is also the present, but boiled down.

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

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

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

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.