Ian MacKaye Quotes

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.

For me as a solo artist, I never want to be a nostalgia act.

Talking about the show reminds you of things that you went through. So it's fun. When the show was on, I couldn't have handled it. I didn't want that direct connection.

I started to write things down, as a very young child, wanting to find a way to remember - to keep close, somehow - moments that made an impression on me.

I don't dismiss the music that I was involved with, I don't think it was a joke, I don't think it was funny or a phase, I don't think it was just something I was doing back then, to me it was who I am. It connects all the way through. I don't distance myself from any of it.

If I were a writer and not a singer in 10 years, I don't know how I'd feel about writing really personal songs and getting someone else to sing them.

Every song brings back memories, like I remember where I wrote all these songs. 'Universal Heartbeat' was my apartment in New York City. 'My Sister' was at my apartment in Boston. I remember places and I remember what I was thinking when I wrote it.

I like to spend time in the past, with the things that have been important to me.

I'm not particularly fond of the past, but I do ramble on about it quite a bit.

You drive past your old high school, and even if everybody treated you terribly, you still go take a look, don't you?

It's your glove, your baseball glove. It's got a soul, a memory all its own, and a future that never fades because it has never let go of the grasp the past has on you and so many others.

Acting brings up a lot of the past. I use my memories, whether they're good or bad.

Y'know, it's funny: I didn't think I'd be playing 'Hold The Line' at 60 years old. I was 19 when I first played that.

I had to be honest in my songwriting for it to be where it is, and it's always scary wondering if anyone will connect with that.

…she remembered watching a summer sunset from this very spot. Not so long ago; just a lifetime.

I want to visit Memory Lane, I don't want to live there.

I open journal, I look at the picture and I remember where I was. And I remember the time of day, the temperature of the air, what music was playing, or who was talking to me, or who was looking over my shoulder and what conversations we had and the smells of the earth and the time of year it was. It's all there for me in a way that we don't get looking at a snapshot. Most of us look back at a snapshot from ten years ago and say, where was that? We don't even remember where we were.

Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering handwriting that you know was once yours but that now seems only dimly familiar can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time.

Clothing is . . . an exercise in memory. It makes me explore the past: how did I feel when I wore that. They are like signposts in the search for the past.

That mirror, that's one I hate to let go, he said. That was my daughter's the whole time she was growing up. It probably seen her more than me--everything from a baby up to twenty years old. Sometimes I wonder if all that might still be inside it. Got to make an impression on a thing, reflecting the same person every day.

I'm basically in every band I ever was in, and the songs, I still mean them all. I don't take anything back, so I do look after them to some degree. But my main focus is on what I'm doing now.

Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.

The past is no farther away than your pillow.

I liked the place I came from. But a lot of what I liked about it was that I had come from there.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling ,and sewn with rebus threads.Most of the time , the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on .