John Banville Quotes

The past always looks better than it was. It’s only pleasant because it isn’t here.

It's funny how the present can change the past.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

From depicting the past, so goes the suspicion, it is a short step to glorifying the past.

Selective memory has always been the problem. An insistence on seeing some people and movements as the sum only of their brightest and most glorious moments, and others as unmitigated villains, makes for a vision of history that is tragically incomplete.

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

If you ask two people to remember a specific event, the stories are going to vary wildly because we always make ourselves out to be the hero.

An underexplored reason why nostalgic art is worthwhile is that it influences the way the past is remembered.

When you look back on things, your version is always perfect.

People only remember what they want to remember.

What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

Memory inevitably romanticizes, pressing reality to recede like pain.

The scenes and events of long ago, and the persons who took part in them, wear a charming aspect to the eye of memory, which sees only the outlines and takes no note of disagreeable details. The present enjoys no such advantage, and so it always seems defective.

The past always seems somehow more golden, more serious, than the present. We tend to forget the partisanship of yesteryear, preferring to re-imagine our history as a sure and steady march toward greatness.

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events.

Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.

If anyone looks back to the '70s, '80s with nostalgic rosy colored glasses and goes, 'Well, everything was awesome.' No, everything was not awesome!

We romanticize the past with an illusion that we'd know how we'd fit.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.

When I was a child, Sunday afternoons felt like they could last a week or a month. Increasingly, as I get older, time is going so, so fast.

One's memories aren't what actually happened - they're very subjective. You can always make it much better, right?

Film has changed the way we look at the past.

You can't trust your memory. You change it to suit yourself.

We tend to paint the past only in extremes, as having been either categorically better than the present or irredeemably bad.