Elie Wiesel Quotes

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

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.

I do enjoy thinking about the past.

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.

It was a long time ago now. And it was yesterday.

I came in 11 years ago. I remember it like it was tomorrow

Memory is the medium of the must-have-been.

The past is a palimpsest. Early memories are always obscured by accumulations of later knowledge.

This is the place. Stand still, my steed,- Let me review the scene, And summon from the shadowy past The forms that once have been.

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

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

there was a time when these weren't memories.

History could hover, like a faint perfume or a memory stamped on the back of one's eyelids.

I was looking at the photographs and I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories.

The older you get the more you live in the past

Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.

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

Memory - the very skin of life.

But standing in that hallway, it was all coming back to me. Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me.

Memories were the markers of the journey through life. It was necessary to know where you had come from. Only then could you know where you were going.

I thought of the future, and spoke of the past.

Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.