Kate Atkinson Quotes

A year's a long time, but it also flickers past in no time at all.

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

Not only is the past of a person with no memory inaccessible; his ability to think about the future is imperilled. Time travel, then, is ultimately - and paradoxically - an exercise in remembering. And without that capacity it simply cannot exist.

Yesterday is just a memory.

Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

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

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

I only remember the future.

When you are in the future, the past looks different.

Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.

With most men, scarce a link of memory holds yesterday and to-day together.

Do old people always live in the past? What yesterday was firm and true, may not be so today.

In memory, you can access something from the past, anything that you've experienced that you remember - it's there. Now, you might have a memento of it in a photograph or in a film or a building or some clothes that you wore. There might be something that connects you to this memory. But all of us are just all caught in this time, whatever that is.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.

That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.

What if I left my memory in the future and I have to catch up to it?

Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.

The past scampers like an alley cat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter.

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity - then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing!

There is no distance on this earth as far away as yesterday.

Things you did. Things you never did. Things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.

Merely having seen the season change in a country gave one the sense of having been there for a long time.

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire