Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

This moment will just be another story someday.

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.

Let us say in the pocket of one of my old coats I find a movie ticket from many years ago. Once I see the ticket, not only do I remember that I saw this movie, but also scenes from this movie, which I think I have entirely forgotten, come back to me. Objects have this power, and I like it.

I look forward and see myself look back.

Every photo, every 'ONCE' in time is also the beginning of a story starting 'once upon a time...' Every photo is the first frame of a movie.

I associate times with certain music. It still is that for me. It's telling the story of our lives.

Life is short. Time is short. As we get older, time does quicken. It's long, and it's long pertaining to that thought, that the past is not done with you because you can't rid of it.

If I look back I am lost.

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

Remembering our past, carrying it around with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it.

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

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.

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.

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

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

The past is no farther away than your pillow.

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

I was born in 1949 - which seems like a long time ago... Actually, it is a long time ago, when I think about it.

If you were falling in love and you could go back in time and relive a day and see the banal things you did that you'd forgotten about, you'd weep, looking at that day.

My focus is always on the day. What I've done behind me, I try to have respect for it, and keep an eye on it, and make sure it isn't abused, and obviously be thoughtful about it, because it's all real to me. I'm basically in every band I ever was in, and the songs, I still mean them all.

Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future.

I realized I've spent all my life creating a past.

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'm in a position to look back at my life, and I realized there were a number of experiences that needed to be documented.

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.