Ben Gibbard Quotes

The only thing simple about the past is that it's not now.

The great times were never as great as they seem in the rearview mirror.

I remember things being more clearer, at one time things were more real.

We are always looking into the future, but we see only the past.

Everything looks more beautiful in retrospect.

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

I find it hard to focus looking forward. So I look backward.

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages.

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

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

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

Your past is just that, the past, a place within your psyche with no more reality to it then the picture of a castle on a postcard is made from stone.

Nobody ever lived in the past.

Each generation supposes that the world was simpler for the one before it.

Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn't live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at.

There's a sort of romanticizing of the past. When you actually think about the past, you know it's a little different.

Reality is always the story of a past, and what I love about the past is—it's over.

An adventure is never an adventure when it happens. An adventure is simply physical and emotional discomfort recollected in tranquility.

Why does the past look so enticing to us? For the same reason why from a distance a meadow with flowers looks like a flower bed.

Sentimentality and nostalgia are closely related. Kissing cousins. I have no time for nostalgia, though. Nostalgics believe the past is nicer than the present. It isn't. Or wasn't. Nostalgics want to cuddle the past like a puppy. But the past has bloody teeth and bad breath. I look into its mouth like a sorrowing dentist.

How many people long for that "past, simpler, and better world," I wonder, without ever recognizing the truth that perhaps it was they who were simpler and better, and not the world about them?

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory.

Nothing in nature is as simple as it sometimes seems when reduced to words.