Paul Auster Quotes

The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.

[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.

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

There is no fence nor hedge round time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it if you can remember.

I do enjoy thinking about the past.

Memory is the best of all gardens. Therein, winter and summer, the seeds of their past lie dormant, ready to spring into instant bloom at any moment the mind wishes to bring them to life.

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.

And never forget, there is memory.

I still preserve those relics of past sufferings and experience, like pillars of witness set up in travelling through the valve of life, to mark particular occurrences. The footsteps are obliterated now; the face of the country may be changed; but the pillar is still there, to remind me how all things were when it was reared.

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

I'm surprised by how much I remember.

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.

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

Recalling, for me, is a great way of living, so not to forget.

I have a very vivid memory.

You can revisit - the wonderful thing about my job is you can revisit your 22-year-old self or your 24-year-old self any particular night you want. The songs pick up some extra resonance, I hope, but they're still - they're there, and I can revisit that period of my life when I choose. So it's quite a nice experience.

Remembrance of things past.

These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me.

Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. It is only later that they claim remembrance, when they show their scars.

The important thing about having lots of things to remember is that you’ve got to go somewhere afterwards where you can remember them, you see? You’ve got to stop. You haven’t really been anywhere until you’ve got back home.

Recordar: To remember; from the Latin records, to pass back through the heart

Memory has always fascinated me. Think of it. You can recall at will your first day in high school, your first date, your first love.

I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.

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