Jean Baudrillard Quotes

I remember things being more clearer, at one time things were more real.

History is a state of yearning. I yearn for Kay Lake throughout this entire thing. There's an essay I've written where I talked about living in the past. There's a whole motif in the book of then and now. And I lived there.

The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages.

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

We all pine for a time in life when things were simpler. Even when they weren't necessarily simpler, hindsight makes them look a lot simpler. The reality of it was that it wasn't.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

There is always something rather absurd about the past.

I only remember the future.

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

And then, into the fantasy, as into a dream, would come the thought: it's not like this anymore; the world has changed. Just the way, even at that time fully two years after my mother's death, I'd catch myself thinking about her as alive; and would suddenly remember, an admonitory finger of grief upon my breast, that she was gone.

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

Do old people always live in the past? What yesterday was firm and true, may not be so today.

And your own life while it's happening to you never has any atmosphere until it's a memory.

You change the past when you change the way you see it.

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

Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.

Even when men approve of the same arrangements, it must be asked whether they approve of them because they exist or because they are desirable in themselves. The common resistance to the collectivist tide should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the belief in integral freedom is based on an essentially forward-looking attitude and not on any nostalgic longing for the past or a romantic admiration for what has been.

Your past is just that, the past, a place within your psyche with no more reality to it then the picture of a castle on a postcard is made from stone.

We are always looking into the future, but we see only the past.

I've changed my ways a little, I cannot now Run with you in the evenings along the shore, Except in a kind of dream, and you, if you dream a moment, You see me there.

I feel blessed in the knowledge that I probably belong to the last generation that will remember what we call "traditional America."

Nobody ever lived in the past.

All these years I've had a story in my mind, the story about us that never really existed. And because of that story, I've kept you framed up on the wall in a little box of nostalgic moonlight.

I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning then. Would you?