Jesmyn Ward Quotes

The future continues to preoccupy me as a reliable source of hopes, fears and anxieties, but increasingly the present seems to have no outstanding qualities of its own, being merely a way-station through which events travel to the vast shadow lands of the past.

The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present.

Each moment is defined by a multitude of histories, the past constantly converging upon us, perpetually decaying and reforming itself on the steady pulse of now, now, now, now.

There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.

We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.

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.

People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have.

We have to keep an eye on the future with a sense of the past in every passing moment of the present.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

The past is a present force.

One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.

The past becomes a texture, an ambience to our present.

I think the beautiful thing about the past is that it leads you to the present.

My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image.

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

As I get older, the present and the past shift and become the past and the future... A lot of it is a new awareness of time and life and the wheel of fortune crushing you and lifting you and crushing you and lifting you.

Time doesn't go. Time stays. We go.

Time is numbered only to man.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

Time is an illusion. Time only exists when we think about the past and the future. Time doesn't exist in the present here and now.

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

Human's can't live in the present as animals do; they just live in the present. But human's are always thinking about the future or the past.

Yesterday is but today's memory, and tomorrow is today's dream.

They say every writer really just writes about one thing over and over. I guess my one thing is how the past impacts the present.

What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.