Ian Mcewan Quotes

All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don't think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I'm looking at something dead.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

Alas! the fleeting years, how they roll on!

It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. ... All photographs are memento mori. To take photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt

You have to remember that goodbyes are temporary because no one ever really leaves and nothing lasts forever. People are always with us, because they are in our hearts and in our memory. The only thing we can depend on is change... Life is just a series of moments -- a string of pearls that make up the necklace of your life and so every once in a while, to complete the circle, you need to end a chapter.

I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago, and of people who will see a world that I shall never know.

Forget the suffering You caused others. Forget the suffering Others caused you. The waters run and run, Springs sparkle and are done, You walk the earth you are forgetting. Sometimes you hear a distant refrain. What does it mean, you ask, who is singing? A childlike sun grows warm. A grandson and a great-grandson are born. You are led by the hand once again. The names of the rivers remain with you. How endless those rivers seem! Your fields lie fallow, The city towers are not as they were. You stand at the threshold mute.

There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed bear, what moves us about many objects is not what remains but what has vanished. There comes a time, thanks to rivers, when a few beautiful old teeth are all that remain of the two-hundred-foot spires of life we call trees. There comes a river, whose current is time, that does a similar sculpting in the mind.

We have this time to meet and do something, or just be together, and then we lose it and move to another kind of time, another kind of being, I guess. Those left behind must mourn, remember, and live on as we know.

The world isn't going backward, if you can just stay young enough to remember what it was really like when you were really young.

Time stays, we go.

I long for the time of no more departures. It has something to do with age, probably.

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

But where are the snows of yester year?

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

One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

I think a lot of people want to be remembered the way they were, as opposed to the way they are now.

If youth is a defect, it is one we outgrow too soon.

The past is where its supposed to be.

Writers and believers live their lives haunted by the same question: What happens to our days once they disappear? The objective fact is that each day that passes is lost forever, as forbidden to us as the dead. But prayer and fiction offer a different answer. Those lost days still live among us, written in each person's hand, turned into stories.

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.

We are tomorrow's past.

There is always something rather absurd about the past.

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