Michel Faber Quotes

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

Visiting old haunts is hard on memory. Things shrink, change, and disappear.

Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

But the world moves on, even when you don’t want it to, even when change feels like the end of everything. It never stops. That’s harsh and magical and somewhat comforting because nothing is immutable, however much we want it to be. Moments cannot be caught like fossils in amber, ever- perfect,ever-beautiful. They go dark and raw, full of shadows, leaving you with the memories. And the world moves on.

But where are the snows of yester year?

Time, memory, loss and love are my main artistic concerns, but time, among all of them, becomes the determinant.

Nothing can last forever. There isn't any memory, no matter how intense, that doesn't fade out at last.

I didn't realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.

It is all falling indelibly into the past.

The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.

And her life will perhaps be the richer, for holding now within it the memory of what came, but could not stay.

This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.

You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.

This is the time to remember cause it will not last forever. These are the days to hold onto cause we won't although we'll want to.

How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly?

I was looking at the photographs and I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories.

It's about moments in life that are great but don't last. They don't go on, but you always have the memory and they have an effect on you. That's what I was thinking about.

Our nemesis is time, against which we have a single ally, memory, and even it betrays us.

as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.

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.

It’s difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything’s changed.

The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.

That's the trouble with living things. Don't last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.

What came is gone forever every time