Damon Galgut Quotes

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

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

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.

The past is just something that's over.

It is all falling indelibly into the past.

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

Not Heav'n itself upon the past has pow'r; But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

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")

We're captive on the carousel of time, we can't return we can only look behind.

Don't think about what you've left behind. If what one finds is made of pure matter, it will never spoil. And one can always come back. If what you had found was only a moment of light, like the explosion of a star, you would find nothing on your return.

There is no distance on this earth as far away as yesterday.

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.

One may return to the place of his birth, He cannot go back to his youth.

All things are taken from us, and become Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.

Time is flying never to return.

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.

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

But where are the snows of yester year?

To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.

If I've learned one thing in life, it's you can never go back.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

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 things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The past is over.