Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes

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

Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.

[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.

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.

Having lost our present and our future, we had of necessity to bend all our endeavors to the past, which no one could take from us if only we were vigilant enough.

Still, looking through the old volumes was soothing, because thinking of the past made the present seem a little less real.

We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories. Some take us forward, they're called dreams.

But where are the snows of yester year?

I watch these old films in black and white, and suddenly the door opens, and there I am. The other day, I was wearing the most awful hat.

The good old days are now.

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can't quite name.

Nostalgia is not a place to live.

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.

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

memory is the only way home.

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

We all have appointments with the past.

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.

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

Nobody ever lived in the past.

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

If you love life you also love the past, because it is the present as it has survived in memory." Translation by David Downie