Pat Paulsen Quotes

The results would have stayed on the watch face until the batteries died. But trying to make time stand still this way would have been a mistake. It is just as important to erase times eventually as to save them at first.

Time will pass and seasons will come and go.

You can never figure out what the future sounds like. As soon as you make it, it's the past.

Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides.

The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present.

We are tomorrow's past.

Time moves on for everyone.

It's life isn't it? You plow ahead and make a hit. And you plow on and someone passes you. Then someone passes them. Time levels.

Time brings all things to pass.

While the river of life glides along smoothly, it remains the same river; only the landscape on either bank seems to change.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

I have seen the future, and it is much like the present, only longer.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

The Past, The Present, For the Future

One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.

History can just be so unkind as time passes.

Nothing is forever, but history is forever.

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

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.

The future is much like the present, only longer.

The things that have come into being change continually. The man with a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing.

But where are the snows of yester year?

Yesterday's just a memory, tomorrow is never what it's supposed to be.