David Lynch Quotes

We are not apt to think of the importance of events as they transpire with us, but we feel the importance of them afterwards.

I think you only see experiences as defining moments with distance.

You know, now it's sinking in. It's taken me a long time to realize - and it is sinking in - how important this book is. And I have a certain distance now. I've done it such a long time ago.

The big picture doesn't just come from distance; it also comes from time.

When we talk about people or a party being on the wrong side of history, it usually requires some hindsight, a position of informed advantage to see clearly missteps that were less clear at the time of events.

The future? Like unwritten books and unborn children, you don't talk about it.

Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life.

History never looks like history when you are living through it.

Without philosophy, history is always for me dead and dumb.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

Some things don't wind up sounding like you'd expect, which is just as well.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

It is always the unreadable that occurs.

No man can tell what the future may bring forth

… experience should teach us that it is always the unexpected that does occur!

The power of a thing or an act is in the meaning and the understanding.

Life must be understood backwards. But it must be lived forwards.

I see things about the present more clearly when I'm looking through the frame of the past: I think it's very hard to assess the present moment that we are in.

Some things get clearer as you look back on them.

As a kid, you don't know what's going on at the time. But once you get older, you start to realize it.

Sometimes one misses the sign posts as you're going down the road. They aren't as obvious as they become when you get to the end of the road, so to speak.

There's a lot of clarity in hindsight.

Sometimes, hindsight is 20/20. Sometimes it takes another situation to kind of make you look back at a different situation and really see how good you had it, you know?

He to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.

The meaning of today will not be clear until tomorrow.