John Jay Chapman Quotes

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

I'm living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.

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.

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

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 see things about the present more clearly when I'm looking through the frame of the past: I think it's very hard to assess the present moment that we are in.

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

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

Yesterday's the past, tomorrow's the future, but today is a gift. That's why it's called the present.

Happiness in the present is only shattered by comparison with the past.

I used to build lofts in SoHo back when there was nothing there. I had a stoop on West Broadway between Prince and Spring. My partner and I would sit there, eat dinner, and watch the world go by.

I am not a picture guy. I like to live in the present and keep the image of the past vivid in my mind. I don't need the precision of the picture.

I feel so at home in New York that I don't have the urge to write about it.

Traditionally, photography is supposed to capture an event that has passed; but that is not what I'm looking for. Photography brings the past into the present when you look at it.

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.

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

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

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.

Well, 9/11 made me think about the towers, and the fact that I lived in New York for a long time, while they were being built. In fact, I had a studio that was ripped out, along with the whole neighborhood, to put the towers in. I saw them go up. I lived with them, running past them in the morning. And they were like part of my furniture.

There is always something rather absurd about the past.

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

I only remember the future.

The past and the present are within the field of my inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer.