Tom Verlaine Quotes

I wear the key of memory, and can open every door in the house of my life.

To think is to be sick.

I have to admit I do get a bit depressed at times and you know I think about the good old days when I was charging ahead.

The past is never where you think you left it.

There's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill and we're all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don't wind up needing extra help. So I think that "mental illness," as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something.

Remembering our past, carrying it around with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it.

I wandered through the streets thinking of all the things I might have said and might have done had I been other than I was.

Nothing in my life ever seemed to fade away or take its rightful place among the pantheon of experiences that constituted my eighteen years. It was all still with me, the storage space in my brain crammed with vivid memories, packed and piled like photographs and old dresses in my grandmother’s bureau. I wasn’t just the madwoman in the attic — I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me.

I write a lot about the past because I really see things clearly in hindsight.

I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists

For two minutes a day, think of one positive experience that's occurred during the past 24 hours. Bullet point each detail you can remember. It works, because the brain can't tell the difference between visualization and actual experience. So you've just doubled the most meaningful experience in your brain.

Your outer world is a reflection of your inner world.

But there is, I have learned, no permanent escape from the past. It may be an unrecognized law of our nature that we should be drawn back, inevitably, to the place where we have suffered most.

I am the thought you are now thinking.

The past was always there, lived inside of you, and it helped to make you who you were. But it had to be placed in perspective. The past could not dominate the future.

The past is what you take with you.

There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past.

The truth about autobiographical songs, he realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning.

Why are women so fond of raking up the past? They're as bad as tailors, who invariably remember what you owe them for a suit long after you've ceased to wear it.

I'm not really thinking much... Just sort of, trying to feel.

Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.

But each time you use spirit, you're more likely to go crazy.” “Already crazy about you, Sage.

i was perhaps an egotist in youth, but i soon found it made me morbid to think too much about myself

Everything that you know about yourself comes from thinking back, and I think I saw religion as the first big betrayal of me.

I think that there's some confusion in my own mind about what I believe.