Jonathan Carroll Quotes

Men wrongly lament the flight of time, blaming it for being too swift; they do not perceive that its passage is sufficiently long, but a good memory, which nature has given to us, causes things long past to seem present.

What business does memory have with time?

Memory is therefore, neither Perception nor Conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time. As already observed, there is no such thing as memory of the present while present, for the present is object only of perception, and the future, of expectation, but the object of memory is the past. All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals which perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is also that whereby they remember.

The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings, the past and the future are not as real, but rather more real than the present.

...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.

In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.

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

As you get older what you think was 10 years ago was actually 15 years ago.

The past is an obdurate stranger that puts as many marks on us as we attempt to impose on it.

It is children only who enjoy the present; their elders either live on the memory of the past or the hope of the future.

The past is always triple-A. We can all remember what the past was. But if we try to make the future triple-A, we have no future. The future is always single-B.

Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.

Time is but the space between our memories; as soon as we cease to perceive this space, time has disappeared.

The swiftness of time is infinite, as is still more evident when we look back on the past.

Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

That whole day [ of the space flight] is very vividly impressed on my memory because it was such a new experience. We hadn't done that before. And then I've recalled it so often since then I think that it's a - it's remained very vivid over the past 50 years, seems to me like about a week or two instead of 50 years.

Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin.

It was a long time ago now. And it was yesterday.

Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia.

I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.

Memory is a wonderful thing if you don't have to deal with the past.

Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.

The past is never where you think you left it.

Isn't it fortunate how selective our recollections usually are.

NOW is the only reality. All else is either memory or imagination.