William Landay Quotes

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

Fifty years," I hackneyed, "is a long time." "Not when you're looking back at them," she said. "You wonder how they vanished so quickly.

In my case, I write in the past because I'm not really part of the present. I have nothing valid to say about anything current, though I have something to say about what existed then.

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

Theoretically, we know that the world turns, but in fact we do not notice it, the earth on which we walk does not seem to move andwe live on in peace. This is how it is concerning Time in our lives. And to render its passing perceptible, novelists must... have their readers cross ten, twenty, thirty years in two minutes.

Even one's yesterdays could not continue to stir and move in a man's mind unless there were a future for those yesterdays to make.

The past is never where you think you left it.

The moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train.

It's true though: time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night," the bartender says, loudly striking a book match and lighting a cigarette. "You can't fight it.

You've got to always go back in time if you want to move forward.

The notion of time bothers me. You look at thirty-year-old photographs and realize how the time has passed.

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

Looking back is a way to sharpen the focus on the things you want to change in your life. I think there's something about nostalgia that really puts a fine point on the here-and-now, and that can be incredibly fascinating and interesting and engaging for the mind.

When I remember bygone days I think how evening follows morn So many I loved were not yet dead, So many I love were not yet born.

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

[M]emory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.

We all have appointments with the past.

The swiftness of time is infinite, as is still more evident when we look back on the past.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.

For the majority of us, the past is a regret, the future an experiment

The past scampers like an alley cat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter.

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.

Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering handwriting that you know was once yours but that now seems only dimly familiar can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time.

Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

Time moves only forward, never back. We look forward to a moment and then it arrives and an instant later it is gone. Like something on the surface of a river that we reached for but did not touch in time and it carried on, away. You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind.