Tom Waits Quotes

Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystalize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days. It is silent and elusive, refusing to be damned and dripped out day by day; it swirls through the mind while an entire lifetime can ride like foam on the deceptive, transparent waves and get sprayed onto the conciousness at ragged, unexpected intervals.

Every play I write is about love and distance. And time. And from that we can get things like history.

Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart's desire.

Time is not a road - it is a room.

Time is but the space between our memories; as soon as we cease to perceive this space, time has disappeared.

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

When we talk about our lives, long or short, brief and tragic or enduring beyond comprehension, we impose a continuity on them, and that continuity is a lie.

[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.

Nothing is more consuming, or more illogical, than the desire for remembrance.

Nostalgia is not what it used to be.

I think the relationship between memory and time is a very deep and tricky one, to tell you the truth. I don't consider memory another sense. I do consider memory that which allows us to think that time flows.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

You know how it is. Every time you kiss someone else, in a way you always remember that very first time.

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

Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our hearts.

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

You know how certain adults feel, the older they get, the longer the walk was to school? Well, I don't feel like that.

It's odd but even when I was a kid, I would write about 'old and other times' as though I had a lot of years behind me. Now I do, so there is a difference in the weight of memory.

He paused again as a tear of longing rolled from cheek to lip with the sweet-salty taste of an old memory.

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.

Memory is satisfied desire.

Because who can describe that look that triggers the memory of loved ones? Who can anticipate the frown, the smile, or the misplaced lock of hair that sends a swift, undeniable signal from the past? Who can ever estimate the power of association, which is always strongest in moments of love and in memories of death?

Swift defined observation to be an old man's memory.