Teju Cole Quotes

There was no way to grasp the reality of the present which slid away each second, invisible as air; reality only existed after the fact, in one's vision of the past.

We think we’re in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.

The older you get the more you live in the past

The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.

Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal—the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to routine?

The most notable thing about Time is that it is so purely relative. A large amount of reminiscence is, by common consent, conceded to the drowning man; and it is not past belief that one may review an entire courtship while removing one's gloves.

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.

Time can also be a place.... Everything depends on where you are standing, on where you look or what you hear. The measure of it is found in consciousness itself.

While I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment, since I have not reached the stage of development at which I would be capable of perceiving it. A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveller, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.

We live in reference to past experience and not to future events, however inevitable.

Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!

I believe one thing: that today is yesterday and tomorrow is today and you can't stop.

Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.

Men wrongly lament the flight of time, blaming it for being too swift; they do not perceive that its passage is sufficiently long, but a good memory, which nature has given to us, causes things long past to seem present.

A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.

NOW is the only reality. All else is either memory or imagination.

A year's a long time, but it also flickers past in no time at all.

Past and to come, seems best; things present, worse.

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

If there is any good in life, in history, in my own past, I invoke it now. I invoke it with all the passion with which I have lived.

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past

I thought of the future, and spoke of the past.