Jeanette Winterson Quotes

The past is more than a memory.

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

It takes only a few seconds to make history new again.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

We are tomorrow's past.

History takes time... History makes memory.

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.

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.

We possess nothing certainly except the past

Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity - then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing!

The past is always with us, for nothing that once was time can ever depart.

Someone, I tell you, in another time will remember us

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.

You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.

The past is not a package one can lay away.

History is the memory of time, the life of the dead and the happiness of the living.

Memories were short and history unkind. It was the way of the world.

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

No day shall erase you from the memory of time

The past has an undeniable grip on everyone, except, perhaps, amnesiacs.

The only thing simple about the past is that it's not now.

What does legacy mean? I never think or go there.

I think it's important to have some documentation of the past.