Isma'il Quotes

Sitting on the floor, I'd replay the past in my head. Funny, that's all I did, day after day after day for half a year, and I never tired of it. What I'd been through seemed so vast, with so many facets. Vast, but real, very real, which was why the experience persisted in towering before me, like a monument lit up at night. And the thing was, it was a monument to me.

I look at the past and I see myself.

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

That's a part of me going back to what I used to do.

It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.

We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward, are dreams.

To him who has thought, or done, or suffered much, the level days of his childhood seem at an immeasureable distance, far off as the age of chivalry, or as the line of Sesostris.

Memory is the best of all gardens. Therein, winter and summer, the seeds of their past lie dormant, ready to spring into instant bloom at any moment the mind wishes to bring them to life.

We all have appointments with the past.

Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees ... one's happiness, one's reality?

The past is one evil less and one memory more.

And here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest it.

But today when I am 17 and warm and well fed, I'm keeping this journal for myself so I can always remember life as we knew it, life as we know it, for a time when I am no longer in the sunroom.

All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.

Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.

I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.

Keep some souvenirs of your past, or how will you ever prove it wasn't all a dream?

This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared.

Im one step ahead of my past, two steps behind my dream.

We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories. Some take us forward, they're called dreams.

Taste refers to the past, imagination to the future.

We were younger. And it's basically like looking at football classics. You see things that you did, you see things that you could've done better and you think about all the good relationships that you had with the cast.

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

You realize yourself when you start reflecting - because I don't live in the past, although your past is so much a part of what you are - that you can't ignore it. But I don't look at scrapbooks.