Joseph Addison Quotes

[M]emory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.

I do enjoy thinking about the past.

Swift defined observation to be an old man's memory.

Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal—the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to routine?

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

I was born in 1949 - which seems like a long time ago... Actually, it is a long time ago, when I think about it.

There is no fence nor hedge round time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it if you can remember.

Looking back across the years, so many pictures flash on the screen of my memory that just as I begin to see one clearly, another slides in, blotting out the first, itself to be pushed aside by the next and the next and the next.

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.

I just find that there's something about looking back on interviews, whether for purposes of remembering what I said about something or if it's for posterity when I'm 75.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.

You can certainly get an idea of the value of memory if your memories can carry you out into the world no matter how utterly dissatisfied you may be with the present and wish you could get away from it.

A lot of times as an actor you watch a film it's like thumbing through a photo book from your past. It's people you haven't seen in a while, there are people that have passed away, and there are people you owe phone calls to.

I'll admit, when I look back on the past couple decades, a lot of it seems like a blur.

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

I write - so it would seem - to recapture, to preserve and return to the past, though I might just as easily be writing to forget and put that past behind me.

That which resembles most living one's life over again, seems to be to recall all the circumstances of it; and, to render this remembrance more durable, to record them in writing.

If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it.

When I remember bygone days I think how evening follows morn So many I loved were not yet dead, So many I love were not yet born.

…she remembered watching a summer sunset from this very spot. Not so long ago; just a lifetime.

Memory is the best of all gardens. Therein, winter and summer, the seeds of their past lie dormant, ready to spring into instant bloom at any moment the mind wishes to bring them to life.

I want to visit Memory Lane, I don't want to live there.