Benny Green Quotes

I've got a good memory. Sometimes it's a curse. I remember what the light was like in the room the first time I heard Van Morrison's 'Moondance.'

When I was to come to Washington the first time as Music Director of the Boston Symphony, Mrs. Johnson phoned us to find out if they could give us a party and who we would like to meet.

So much of memory comes from the beginning of our lives when we know the world for the first time with a kind of clarity. It is that discovery of the past in the present on which a writer depends again and again as if our lost childhoods, like the surprising cyclamen plant, are forever opening new blossoms.

I listened to it last night for the first time since we started this project. I went out to my car and put it in and went to an empty parking lot and just listened and read the little pamphlet that came with it. After two or three songs I burst into tears.

I got into music when I was a little boy. My dad was always into jazz. I got my education from him. The first time I listened to jazz, he gave me a Thelonious Monk record. It was so different from anything I had ever heard. It took me a while to understand it, and I liked that. I liked the fact that it wasn't immediately palatable.

Music makes time fall away like almost nothing else. You hear a song from another moment of your life, and it really is like you're still there.

Music is the way our memories sing to us across time.

Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.

For the first time, he heard something that he knew to be music. He heard people singing. Behind him, across vast distances of space and time, from the place he had left, he thought he heard music too. But perhaps, it was only an echo.

These are things you should learn. Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you; your future is a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don’t wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is. Now, these skeletons are made of memories, dreams, and voices. And they can trap you in the in-between, between touching and becoming. But they’re not necessarily evil, unless you let them be.

The past is not dead; it is not even past. People live on inner time; the moment in which a decisive thought or feeling takes place can be at any time. Timeless feelings are common to all of us.

Pretending the past doesn't exist is as bad as living in it.

This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished, for you, my love, my loss, my lesion, a rosary of words to count out time's illusions, all the minutes, hours, days the calendar compounds as if the past existed somewhere like an inheritance still waiting to be claimed.

Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface.

The leafy blossoming present time springs from the whole past, remembered and unrememberable.

History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time.

Time has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved. You find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree.

Moments are history. If you have enough of them, they become a story.

The past feels distant, even when it's near. The future feels assured, even when it isn't.

I'm 65 years old. Everyday the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.

Each time a friend dies, the present becomes the past, in an instant.

The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable.

Remembrance of things past.

But stories somehow lengthen when begun.