Rodman Philbrick Quotes

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

There is no fence nor hedge round time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it if you can remember.

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

Remembering is the most overrated thing. Forgetting is far superior.

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

The only thing simple about the past is that it's not now.

I was born in 1949 - which seems like a long time ago... Actually, it is a long time ago, when I think about it.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

I'm living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.

I do not exactly remember at what period I started my museum which absorbed so much of my time.

I find it hard to focus looking forward. So I look backward.

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.

I just find that there's something about looking back on interviews, whether for purposes of remembering what I said about something or if it's for posterity when I'm 75.

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

There is always something rather absurd about the past.

All the things that are in the past are in the past.

I do enjoy thinking about the past.

I write - so it would seem - to recapture, to preserve and return to the past, though I might just as easily be writing to forget and put that past behind me.

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

You'd better watch where you go, and remember where you've been

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

But it's our curse and our blessing to remember the past and to know there's a future. —Charlie

Yesterday is just a memory.