Anne Rice Quotes

Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence? I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds. Open your doors and look abroad. From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before. In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years.

Things you did. Things you never did. Things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.

Nostalgias were peeled from it long ago.

We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories. Some take us forward, they're called dreams.

Nostalgia is not what it used to be.

But where are the snows of yester year?

A whole stack of memories never equal one little hope.

The dearest days in one's life are those that seem very far and very near at once.

We recognise that, with time, every human being will cease being, will only have been. And so we seek to resist time. We rebel against it. We are drawn like lovers to the unreachable past, to imagined memories, to nostalgia.

When you go somewhere and think it will be your last time there, you always appreciate the beauty of it even more and want to crystallise emotions that you will keep with you forever.

What's gone will never come back, but it exists when you think of it.

Do we always grind through the present, doomed to throw a gold haze of fond retrospect over the past?

She sits down and puts her hand to her chest and rocks. Thinks of all she has lost and will lose. All she has had and will have. It seems to her that life is like gathering berries into an apron with a hole. Why do we keep on? Because the berries are beautiful, and we must eat to survive. We catch what we can. We walk past what we lose for the promise of more, just ahead.

They say that Hope is happiness But genuine Love must prize the past; And Mem'ry wakes the thoughts that bless: They rose first -- they set the last. And all that mem'ry loves the most Was once our only hope to be: And all that hope adored and lost Hath melted into memory. Alas! It is delusion all-- The future cheats us from afar: Nor can we be what we recall, Nor dare we think on what we are.

The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.

I'd trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday.

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

I used to dream about turning back time, about reclaiming the things I'd lost and the person I used to be.

The past is a candle at great distance: too close to let you quit, too far to comfort you.

That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.

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

I've got a great dislike of reunions. It's a little like trying to go back and relive the best parts of your life, but you can't do it. Nothing is ever the same.

This is what I like about photographs. They're proof that once, even if just for a heartbeat, everything was perfect.

We possess nothing certainly except the past

When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back. Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.