Janet Fitch Quotes

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

Time is not a road - it is a room.

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

We have all forgot more than we remember.

I think memory is essential to what we are. If we - we wouldn't be able to talk to each other without memory. And what we think of as the present really is the past. It is made out of the past.

History is written backwards but lived forwards.

The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.

History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.

Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.

When you're in a place, the details you focus on are different than details you focus on when you're writing about it.

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

I don't write diaries and things like that, but I have a fantastic memory. I call that like a magic carpet. I can really concentrate and travel back in the past I don't know how many years from now and evoke that space if I wanted.

I don't know why it is, but sometimes I feel like I'm 60. It's like I've been around for a long time. I felt that way even when I was 8.

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

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

Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them.

That's history. I say history because it happened in the past.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

The past is where its supposed to be.

You'll find as you grow older that you weren't born such a great while ago after all. The time shortens up.

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

Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.

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

The past is always - one moment it's what happened three minutes ago, and one minute it's what happened 30 years ago. And they flow into each other in ways that we can't predict and that we keep discovering in dreams, which keep bringing up feelings and moments, some of which we never actually saw.

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