Zadie Smith Quotes

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have.

I only remember the future.

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

Whenever we're having a great time, we're already anticipating the day when we will remember this great time. Many of us live in that unreal area between the past, the present, and the future.

For the majority of us, the past is a regret, the future an experiment

When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.

I thought of the future, and spoke of the past.

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.

I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.

The past feels distant, even when it's near. The future feels assured, even when it isn't.

For Yesterday was once To-morrow.

The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.

That's why we have memory. And the opposite of memory— hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can built off our pasts and make future.

As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.

The future will soon be a thing of the past.

Time slips away and leaves you with nothing, mister, but boring stories of glory days.

I ain't really sure, but it seems I remember the good times

The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.

The pictures remind you of something that can never be recaptured, the time is gone, the only thing you know is the present. That's all that's knowable and even the present isn't knowable. The present becomes the past... so you really don't know anything.

Photographs open doors into the past, but they also alloq a look into the future

The Present only has a being in Nature; things Past have a being in the Memory only, but things to come have no being at all; the Future but a fiction of the mind.

Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.

Leaving high school. It's sad and you're going to miss all your friends. You're going to miss your life and you've been doing that for the past four years, and it's comfortable. But now, there's something possibly bigger on the horizon, just new and fresh and exciting. I think we all kind of felt like that.