Harlan Ellison Quotes

Not only is the past of a person with no memory inaccessible; his ability to think about the future is imperilled. Time travel, then, is ultimately - and paradoxically - an exercise in remembering. And without that capacity it simply cannot exist.

No matter how rich you are, you cannot transport yourself to the future or the past.

There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.

History is a river that never ends. Today is history, and I am here at the fountainhead.

Strangely enough, this is the past that somebody in the future is longing to go back to.

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

Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides.

Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future.

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.

I only remember the future.

When you are in the future, the past looks different.

I'm trying to get to a deep future, but in order to get to a deep future, I had to think about the deep past.

You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!

Time. I would have gone somewhere to buy time.

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

The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.

To read is to voyage through time.

Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past.

Remember the past - and await the future.

There is the past, and there is the future. The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other. We live poised on that second as it's hurtling forward-toward what?

What if I left my memory in the future and I have to catch up to it?

Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.

The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich.

And while the future's there for anyone to change, still you know it's seems, It would be easier sometimes to change the past.

Tomorrow! - Why, tomorrow I may be Myself with yesterday's sev'n thousand years.