Jean Cocteau Quotes

There are no footprints backwards!

What I find compelling is the moment in which people realize, with suffering and pain, that in the past there was a time when they were happy, because back then the present and the future coincided - they were one and the same thing.

I practice going backward all the time.

But nobody ever forgot anything, not really, though sometimes they pretended, when it suited them. Memories were permanent. Sorrowful ones remained sad even with the passing of time, yet happy ones could never be recreated - not with the same joy. Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain.

Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case," in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.

Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone has said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shift of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.

They say time flies, but you keep breaking it’s wings.

What golden hour of life, what glittering moment will ever equal the pain its loss can cause?

Time slips away and leaves you with nothing, mister, but boring stories of glory days.

The past is not a package one can lay away.

What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?

Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.

The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.

I reached up with my finger and traced the scar over my eyebrow, remembering when that was the greatest hurt I'd ever known.

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.

We suffer equal pain from the pertinacious adhesion of unwelcome images, as from the evanescence of those which are pleasing and useful.

The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.

Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.

Oskar Schell: If the sun were to explode, you wouldn't even know about it for 8 minutes because thats how long it takes for light to travel to us. For eight minutes the world would still be bright and it would still feel warm. It was a year since my dad died and I could feel my eight minutes with him... were running out.

Sorrow is tranquility remembered in emotion.

O Time and change! - with hair as gray as was my sire's that winter day, how strange it seems, with so much gone of life and love, to still live on!

One may return to the place of his birth, He cannot go back to his youth.

Forgetting lets you live without the pain for a moment but remembering hits hard.