W. S. Merwin Quotes

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

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.

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

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

[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.

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

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

No one ever sits you down at age eight and says, 'Aminatta, this is what's happened so far.' You have to work it out for yourself, and by the time you do, it's ancient history to many of the players. We're trying to make sense of the past, so we start to excavate our memories.

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

There is always something rather absurd about the past.

Because everything up to now is a story and everything after now is a story.

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

All experience is memory, and so everything you write about is from memory-unless you're writing about typing.

We all remember things, it's what we remember that determines how we live.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

The past has an undeniable grip on everyone, except, perhaps, amnesiacs.

The way you remember the past depends upon your hope for the future. And if what you see in your future has no hope, it has no potential, then you view the past that brought you to here as not very good.

I am not a picture guy. I like to live in the present and keep the image of the past vivid in my mind. I don't need the precision of the picture.

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

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.