Stephen Spender Quotes

You get older and you see yourself and say, 'God, he's old, who's that?'

[On being asked in her later years if she were Tallulah:] I'm what's left of her, dahling.

My son tells me, 'Do you realize you are the last one? The last person who was an eyewitness to the golden age?' Young people, even in Hollywood, ask me, 'Were you really married to Humphrey Bogart?' 'Well, yes, I think I was,' I reply. You realize yourself when you start reflecting - because I don't live in the past, although your past is so much a part of what you are - that you can't ignore it. But I don't look at scrapbooks. I could show you some, but I'd have to climb ladders, and I can't climb

To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died, who neither listen nor speak.

At some point, your memories, your stories, your adventures, will be the only things you'll have left.

Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]

Who we are in the present includes who we were in the past.

From early on I valued the gift of memory above all others. I understood that as we grow older we carry a whole nation around inside of us, places and ways that have disappeared, believing that they are ours, that we alone hold the torch for our past, that we are as impenetrable as stone.

But in Hiroshima, some people were wiped clean away, leaving only a wristwatch or a diary page. So no matter that I have inhibitions to fill all my pockets, I keep trying, hoping that one day I'll write a poem I can be proud to let sit in a museum exhibit as the only proof I existed.

It is not that I belong to the past, but the past that belongs to me.

The trace I leave to me means at once my death, to come or already come, and the hope that it will survive me. It is not an ambition of immortality; it is fundamental. I leave here a bit of paper, I leave, I die; it is impossible to exit this structure; it is the unchanging form of my life. Every time I let something go, I live my death in writing.

That's what happens when people reach old age; nobody remembers they've been bastards too.

People talk philosophically, Oh, I don't want to live past 100.' You know, I'd like to hear them say that when they're 99.

What bothers people more than anything is that I'm an old guy taking photos of them. But maybe if you look at the photos, 20, 30 years later, it's not going to matter who took the photos. I mean, they would just be there. People will hopefully get over that.

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.

We exist as long as somebody remembers us.

People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy and I can't do that as Bruce Wayne. As a man I'm flesh and blood, I can be ignored, I can be destroyed, but as a symbol, as a symbol I can be incorruptible. I can be everlasting.

Even if we no longer have much in common, we would have always had the past, which, in some ways, is just as important as the present or future. It is where we come from, what makes us who we are.

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

It is different for us mortals. We are the ones who become old and grey. We are the ones who become worn at the seams and disappear. But not our dreams. They can live on in other people even after we have gone.

Clothing is . . . an exercise in memory. It makes me explore the past: how did I feel when I wore that. They are like signposts in the search for the past.

My past is my shadow, it follows me everywhere I go. Well, all those things come from when I had no other choice. They put my back against the wall. I do what I gotta do.

People is themselves when they are children, and not again till they know they'm dying.

My face carries all of my memories. Why would I erase them?

If you don't tell your stories, other people will tell their story about you. It's important that we nurture and protect these memories. Things change. Existence means change.