Eugene O'Neill Quotes

History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.

The past is always with us, for nothing that once was time can ever depart.

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

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

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.

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

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.

We are tomorrow's past.

I only remember the future.

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

Everything that has been is eternal: the sea will wash it up again.

The past is more than a memory.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.

We possess nothing certainly except the past

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity - then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing!

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 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.

History teaches everything, even the future.

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 past is not a package one can lay away.

The Past -- the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf --the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?

Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.

The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.

The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable.

It's always refreshing to step into another time.