Harry Crews Quotes

Nothing is as bleak as the future, except the past.

There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.

I think people imagine going back to a time when they knew who they were and they knew what the circumstances were - if you screwed up it was your fault.

I think we all miss our childhood.

I only remember the future.

One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

Past and future have no power over you. Just the present - and even that can be minimized.

Midnight! the outpost of advancing day! The frontier town and citadel of night!

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.

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed.

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

If I have to have a past, then I prefer it to be multiple choice.

You must have seen great changes since you were a young man," said Winston tentatively. The old man's pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, and from the bar to the door of the Gents ... "The beer was better," he said finally. "And cheaper! When I was a young man, mild beer - wallop we used to call it - was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course." "Which war was that?" said Winston. "It's all wars," said the old man vaguely. He took up his glass, and his shoulders straightened again. "'Ere's wishing you the very best of 'ealth!

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.

It feels good to be awake, knowing others are asleep. Makes you feel like the night is not for everyone, just a chosen few.

The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen.

There was confusion since I stood here 35 years ago.

The past is closed and limited; the future is open and free.

We possess nothing certainly except the past

And while the future's there for anyone to change, still you know it's seems, It would be easier sometimes to change the past.

This is night, Diddykins. That's what we call it when it goes all dark like this.

You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It's frightening how many people and things there are in a man's past that have stopped moving. The living people we've lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all. As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.