Anatole France Quotes

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

If we forget our past, we won't remember our future and it will be as well because we won't have one.

Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.

Life is the past, the present and the perhaps.

When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.

Life cannot go on without much forgetting.

She was so busy forgetting, she couldn't take a single step into the future.

I never look forward, because I have no idea about how any of it happened to getting here. I've no idea how the next five years are going to be.

I can barely remember what I wrote yesterday, let alone 10 years ago.

I tend not to look back. It's confusing.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

I always find it extremely hard to remember the act of beginning. I almost deliberately forget it.

I only remember the future.

I like people who have the capacity to forget. I think that to forget is a good thing. Forgetting is good. But sometimes I cannot. For me, I cannot.

I am blessed that I quickly forget things.

Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me. The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim. If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire.

Amnesia may well be the highest sacrament in the great gray ritual of existence.

How can we live without the unknown before us?

The past was a dream wasn't it? And who ever remembers dreams?

Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting: So were it with me if forgetting could be willed. Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring, Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.

Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia.

Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.

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

Illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory.

What do people fear most about death? I asked the reb. "Fear?" he thought for a moment. 'Well, for one thing, what happens next? Where do we go? Is it what we imagined?" That's big. "Yes. But there's something else." What else? He leaned forward. "Being forgotten," he whispered.