Joan Baez Quotes

To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.

Time, memory, loss and love are my main artistic concerns, but time, among all of them, becomes the determinant.

The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

Rather than dwelling on the past, we should make the most of today, of the here and now, doing all we can to provide pleasant memories for the future…If you are still in the process of raising children be aware that the tiny fingerprints that show up on almost every newly cleaned surface, the toys scattered about the house, the piles and piles of laundry to be tackled, will disappear all too soon, and that you will, to your surprise, miss them, profoundly.

We're captive on the carousel of time, we can't return we can only look behind.

In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

As ephemeral as our footprints were in the sand along the river, so also were those moments of childhood caught in the photographs. And so will be our family itself, our marriage, the children who enriched it and the love that has carried us through so much. All this will be gone. What we hope will remain are these pictures, telling our brief story.

Your life is what you remember. I mean, some things I wish I still had. But it doesn't matter.

Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

But where are the snows of yester year?

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

The notion of time bothers me. You look at thirty-year-old photographs and realize how the time has passed.

Time, you old gypsy man, will you not stay, put up your caravan just for one day?

Watching your children growing up makes you aware of time passing. You think, 'Oh, God, look at them now! He won't be like this for much longer.'

The things about my childhood that I really loved the most, writing about those things was hard because I knew they would never happen again.

Lovers come back. Styles come back. But time? It never comes back.

Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies.

The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.

I didn't realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.

With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole.

Years have passed and how I am anxiously watching the twilight of my childhood, quietly sinking, never to rise again.

And her life will perhaps be the richer, for holding now within it the memory of what came, but could not stay.

I believe nostalgia has many appearances and that it's not just the privilege of adults. I think children too can have nostalgia. It's one of mankind's most shared emotions. It's one of the things that makes us human. When you live, you lose things. It's a fact of life. So it's natural for everyone to have nostalgia.