Richard Ford Quotes

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

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

Yesterday is just a memory.

The past is one evil less and one memory more.

The past scampers like an alley cat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter.

This moment will just be another story someday.

The past is not a package one can lay away.

It's nine o'clock on a Saturday, the regular crowd shuffles in / There's an old man sitting next to me making love to his tonic and gin / He says, 'Son, can you play me a memory?/ I'm not really sure how it goes / But it's sad and it's sweet, and I knew it complete when I wore a younger man's clothes.'

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

The moon I see now is the same moon I saw before. Except that before, when I looked at it, it was in anticipation of what it would be like when I got there. That's behind me now.

I'm just fascinated by the past. You know, both by the possibilities it holds and by the complete tyranny of it, the way it sort of keeps you in this stranglehold and makes you want things that you no longer have and you can never get back.

I don't have a great nostalgia for the past.

The dearest days in one's life are those that seem very far and very near at once.

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.

All the things that are in the past are in the past.

Do we always grind through the present, doomed to throw a gold haze of fond retrospect over the past?

You, yesterday, did the usual things, just as any day, You don't know if it's worth remembering. You would prefer to remember, there lying in the half-darkness of the bedroom, not what has happened already but what is going to happen. In your half-darkness your eyes would prefer to look ahead, not behind, and they do not know how to foresee the past.

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

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

None would live past years again, Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain; And, from the dregs of life, think to receive, What the first sprightly running could not give.

And your own life while it's happening to you never has any atmosphere until it's 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.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

While in a vintage restaurant..."the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.