Vikram Seth Quotes

As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.

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

Hemingway said the only way to write about a place is to leave it.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

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

I don't have a great nostalgia for the past.

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

It was a perfect night for a train. The occasional whistle told Louis of all the farewells he had ever known.

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.

It's odd but even when I was a kid, I would write about 'old and other times' as though I had a lot of years behind me. Now I do, so there is a difference in the weight of memory.

The scene I had just witnessed (a couple making love in the ocean) brought back a lot of memories – not of things I had done but of things I had failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back. I envied Yeoman and felt sorry for myself at the same time, because I had seen him in a moment that made all my happiness seem dull.

Every man is obsessed by the memories of his own youth.

The act of writing is for me often nothing more than the secret or conscious desire to carve words on a tombstone: to the memory of a town forever vanished, to the memory of a childhood in exile, to the memory of all those I loved and who, before I could tell them I loved them, went away.

Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees ... one's happiness, one's reality?

I remember when I used to be really into nostalgia.

Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed home and thought of here? Where should we be today?

It becomes increasingly easy, as you get older, to drown in nostalgia.

The memories which peaceful country scenes call up, are not of this world, nor of its thoughts and hopes. Their gentle influence may teach us how to weave fresh garlands for the graves of those we loved: may purify our thoughts, and bear down before it old enmity and hatred; but beneath all this, there lingers, in the least reflective mind, a vague and half-formed consciousness of having held such feelings long before, in some remote and distant time, which calls up solemn thoughts of distant times to come, and bends down pride and worldliness beneath it.

But that was the best time of my life, and only now that it has gone from me forever -- only now do I realize it.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.

When we travel, we are like a film at the moment of exposure; it is memory that will develop it.

Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast

So here I sit in the early candle-light of old age-I and my book-casting backward glances over out travel'd road.

I have a feeling that wherever I may be in the future, I will be wondering whether there is rain at Ngong.