Terence McKenna Quotes

We all have appointments with the past.

Strip away the morphing landscapes and rips in the space-time continuum, and my stories are about things that novels have always been about: love and sex and identity and memory and history and redemption.

Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember.

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.

I do enjoy thinking about the past.

I find my past in my present, and from these forecast my future.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.

Books are not men and yet they are alive. They are man's memory and his aspiration, the link between his present and his past, the tools he builds with.

I look at the past and I see myself.

The past is one evil less and one memory more.

A person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you.

You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You can find yourself by coming into the present.

History could hover, like a faint perfume or a memory stamped on the back of one's eyelids.

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.

This is the place. Stand still, my steed,- Let me review the scene, And summon from the shadowy past The forms that once have been.

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.

These handwritten words in the pages of my journal confirm that from an early age I have experienced each encounter in my life twice: once in the world, and once again on the page.

We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.

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

The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.

Keeping a journal has taught me that there is not so much new in your life as you sometimes think. When you re-read your journal you find out that your latest discovery is something you already found out five years ago. Still, it is true that one penetrates deeper and deeper into the same ideas and the same experiences.

My last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write.

In that part of the book of my memory before which little can be read, there is a heading, which says: ‘Incipit vita nova: Here begins the new life’.

Remembrance of things past.

Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.