George Orwell Quotes

The past is never where you think you left it.

Let us say in the pocket of one of my old coats I find a movie ticket from many years ago. Once I see the ticket, not only do I remember that I saw this movie, but also scenes from this movie, which I think I have entirely forgotten, come back to me. Objects have this power, and I like it.

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

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

The past is no farther away than your pillow.

My greatest inspiration is memory.

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

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.

When I write about things, it's a lot to do with sense memory. How things smell and taste can bring incredible memories flooding back and transport you in an instant to another time and place.

Every man is obsessed by the memories of his own youth.

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

Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees ... one's happiness, one's reality?

Strange, what brings these past things so vividly back to us, sometimes!

Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.

All our tastes are but reminiscences.

The past scampers like an alley cat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter.

Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that

Clothing is . . . an exercise in memory. It makes me explore the past: how did I feel when I wore that. They are like signposts in the search for the past.

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?

The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable.

Having lost our present and our future, we had of necessity to bend all our endeavors to the past, which no one could take from us if only we were vigilant enough.

Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.

She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes.

I don't write diaries and things like that, but I have a fantastic memory. I call that like a magic carpet. I can really concentrate and travel back in the past I don't know how many years from now and evoke that space if I wanted.

My focus is always on the day. What I've done behind me, I try to have respect for it, and keep an eye on it, and make sure it isn't abused, and obviously be thoughtful about it, because it's all real to me. I'm basically in every band I ever was in, and the songs, I still mean them all.