Mary Ellen Chase Quotes

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.

Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.

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

I look forward and see myself look back.

But now that I am old, moving every year closer to the end of my life, I also feel closer to the beginning. And I remember everything that happened that day becasue it has happened many times in my life. The same innocence, trust, and restlessness; the wonder, fear, and lonliness. How I lost myself. I remember all these things. And tonight, on the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, I also remember what I asked the Moon Lady so long ago. I wished to be found.

No one measures a life in weeks and days. You measure life in years and by the things that happen to you.

We move through time like a man in a rowboat, looking back even as we move forward.

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

I thought of the future, and spoke of the past.

Looking back over sixty-odd years, life is like a piece of string with knots in it, the knots being those moments that live in the mind forever, and the intervals being hazy, half-recalled times when I have a fair idea of what was happenng, in a general way, but cannot be sure of dates or places or even the exact order in which events took place.

We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories. Some take us forward, they're called dreams.

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

Taste refers to the past, imagination to the future.

I don't know why it is, but sometimes I feel like I'm 60. It's like I've been around for a long time. I felt that way even when I was 8.

You know when you're young you think you will always be. As you become more fragile, you reflect and you realize how much comfort can come from the past. Hymns can carry you into the future.

Perhaps even these things, one day, will be pleasing to remember.

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.

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.

People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have.

As years passed away I have formed the habit of looking back upon that former self as upon another person, the remembrance of whose emotions has been a solace in adversity and added zest to the enjoyment of prosperity.

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

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.