Andre Aciman Quotes

I do enjoy thinking about the past.

Let the past be content with itself, for man needs forgetfulness as well as memory.

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

In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.

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

There is no fence nor hedge round time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it if you can remember.

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

I just find that there's something about looking back on interviews, whether for purposes of remembering what I said about something or if it's for posterity when I'm 75.

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

All the things that are in the past are in the past.

I don't like to look too far back into the past.

I suppose . . . in writing you can't have regrets. I mean, you just get it down the way it was . . . it's only wishful thinking that things could be other than they were.

[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.

Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.

Take time to gather up the past so that you will be able to draw from your experience and invest them in the future.

Whether it is better to forget and let wounds heal or remember and learn from the past is a crucial question for all of us, wherever we are.

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

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

I was born in 1949 - which seems like a long time ago... Actually, it is a long time ago, when I think about it.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

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

I can't really dwell on the past.

I find it hard to focus looking forward. So I look backward.

I tend not to look back. It's confusing.

So much of memory comes from the beginning of our lives when we know the world for the first time with a kind of clarity. It is that discovery of the past in the present on which a writer depends again and again as if our lost childhoods, like the surprising cyclamen plant, are forever opening new blossoms.