William Winter Quotes

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.

In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

The past has an undeniable grip on everyone, except, perhaps, amnesiacs.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.

The past is what the past is.

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

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

I knew I could not cope with the future unless I was able to rediscover the past.

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.

Legends are all to do with the past and nothing to do with the present.

The past is buried and I mourn it with greater pain than many among you, because no human power can awaken it when the Crown itself has scattered ashes upon the coffin.

The now, the here, through which all future plunges into the past.

History takes time... History makes memory.

Never has the future become so rapidly the past.

One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.

History can just be so unkind as time passes.

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present.

The present is the funeral of the past, And man the living sepulchre of life.

Someone, I tell you, in another time will remember us

The past is a bucket of ashes

History is a great dust heap.

Remembrance of things past.

Let the past be content with itself, for man needs forgetfulness as well as memory.