Jonathan Swift Quotes

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 irony of life is not that you cannot forget but that you can.

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

Looking back on high school, I just remember specific scenarios and thinking, wow, that was such a big deal at the time, but right now it feels like it never even happened. So I guess if I can give any advice, I would just say that everything will pass, and it'll feel like it was a big deal over nothing.

If you were falling in love and you could go back in time and relive a day and see the banal things you did that you'd forgotten about, you'd weep, looking at that day.

I do not exactly remember at what period I started my museum which absorbed so much of my time.

All the things that are in the past are in 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.

You, yesterday, did the usual things, just as any day, You don't know if it's worth remembering. You would prefer to remember, there lying in the half-darkness of the bedroom, not what has happened already but what is going to happen. In your half-darkness your eyes would prefer to look ahead, not behind, and they do not know how to foresee the past.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

We all yearn for what we have lost. But sometimes, we forget what we have.

I was born at a very early age. Before I had time to regret it, I was four and a half years old.

The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen.

One forgets so quickly one's own youth.

Yesterday is just a memory.

You probably wouldn't remember. I probably couldn't forget.

We're captive on the carousel of time, we can't return we can only look behind.

The past is one evil less and one memory more.

While in a vintage restaurant..."the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.

you remember what is lost, and you forget what's right in front of you.

If I look back I am lost.

He who forgets will be destined to remember.

Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case," in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.