W. S. Merwin Quotes

Acting brings up a lot of the past. I use my memories, whether they're good or bad.

[Memory] visits when it is hungry, not when you are.

We never remember days, only moments.

The past becomes a texture, an ambience to our present.

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

The only thing simple about the past is that it's not now.

To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

Perhaps even these things, one day, will be pleasing to remember.

Don't time travel into the past, roaming through the nuances as if they can change. Don't bookmark pages you've already read.

Memory is the fourth dimension to any landscape.

Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.

So much of memory comes from the beginning of our lives when we know the world for the first time with a kind of clarity. It is that discovery of the past in the present on which a writer depends again and again as if our lost childhoods, like the surprising cyclamen plant, are forever opening new blossoms.

Yesterday is but today's memory, and tomorrow is today's dream.

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

People do not connect with what happened last week, let alone what happened 20 years ago.

The past is where its supposed to be.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

I'm not particularly fond of the past, but I do ramble on about it quite a bit.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

There is always something rather absurd about the past.

When you are in the future, the past looks different.

Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.