Graham Swift Quotes

It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back.

The content of the ideal is a desire to return to the perfection of an imaginary past.

What better is there to sigh for than happiness, yesterday's or tomorrow's.

We hope for the future, then we reach for the past.

I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy's sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost.

And while the future's there for anyone to change, still you know it's seems, It would be easier sometimes to change the past.

There's no future in our past. Just experience. We want to return to it, but we don't want to close the door on it either.

He was jealous of her future, and she of his past.

Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.

I think you can only be nostalgic for something you've lost.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

I know not why there is such a melancholy feeling attached to the remembrance of past happiness, except that we fear that the future can have nothing so bright as the past.

But where are the snows of yester year?

If you were falling in love and you could go back in time and relive a day and see the banal things you did that you'd forgotten about, you'd weep, looking at that day.

No star is ever lost we once have seen, we always may be what we might have been.

Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.

We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

I'm just fascinated by the past. You know, both by the possibilities it holds and by the complete tyranny of it, the way it sort of keeps you in this stranglehold and makes you want things that you no longer have and you can never get back.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

I hate being so nostalgic about the Sixties.

I am not nostalgic for the past.

What I find compelling is the moment in which people realize, with suffering and pain, that in the past there was a time when they were happy, because back then the present and the future coincided - they were one and the same thing.

Indy, I have lots of great memories from there, and probably the part of me that doesn't feel quite as longing for it is that there is still a chance that I could do it again. It's not gone.

I would have liked the old days.