Augusten Burroughs Quotes

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

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.

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

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

Time is something you can't get back.

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

What's gone will never come back, but it exists when you think of it.

You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way.

Everything ends, people move on, they don't look back. It's how they should be.

I think a lot about the past, it's true. But at my age, the past is more present than the here and now. And there is not much percentage in the future.

I did not want to move. For I had the feeling that this was a place, once seen, that could not be seen again. If I left and then came back, it would not be the same; no matter how many times I might return to this particular spot the place and feeling would never be the same, something would be lost or something would be added, and there never would exist again, through all eternity, all the integrated factors that made it what it was in this magic moment.

We can never go back.

The past is a closed door.

We move through time like a man in a rowboat, looking back even as we move forward.

We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it represents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was progress in it? Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances.

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

The past cannot survive in your presence. It can only survive in your absence.

Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

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.

But the past cannot be changed, and we carry our choices with us, forward, into the unknown. We can only move on.

The past is not a package one can lay away.

I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.

The Things that never can come back, are several- Childhood-some forms of Hope-the Dead- Though Joys-like Men-may sometimes make a Journey- And still abide-.

Pretending the past doesn't exist is as bad as living in it.

Yesterday's gone on down the river and you can't get it back.