Richard Russo Quotes

You, yesterday, did the usual things, just as any day, You don't know if it's worth remembering. You would prefer to remember, there lying in the half-darkness of the bedroom, not what has happened already but what is going to happen. In your half-darkness your eyes would prefer to look ahead, not behind, and they do not know how to foresee the past.

While in a vintage restaurant..."the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.

Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.

The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future.

I thought of the future, and spoke of the past.

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

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

I find it hard to focus looking forward. So I look backward.

I tend not to look back. It's confusing.

People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have.

You look back and you remember the good, the bad and the ugly.

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

I find myself thinking more about the past as I get older... maybe because there's just more of it to think about. At the same time, I'm less haunted by it than I was as a younger person. I guess that's probably the ideal: to reach a point where you have access to all of your memories, but you don't feel victimized by them.

The good old days are now.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

The rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

I only remember the future.

When you are in the future, the past looks different.

I see things about the present more clearly when I'm looking through the frame of the past: I think it's very hard to assess the present moment that we are in.

All the things that are in the past are in the past.

I look forward and see myself look back.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

The meaning of today will not be clear until tomorrow.