Salman Rushdie Quotes

The past is a country from which we have all emigrated

In Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline seamlessly knits together the past and present of two women, one young and one old. Kline reminds us that we never really lose anyone or anything or – perhaps most importantly – ourselves.

Having lost our present and our future, we had of necessity to bend all our endeavors to the past, which no one could take from us if only we were vigilant enough.

Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

I'm relating to a period that doesn't exist anymore.

Nostalgia is, 'Hey, remember the other mall that used to be there?'

If I've learned one thing in life, it's you can never go back.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

The world changed. Hollywood changed. I think we've lost something, and we don't know how to get it back.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

Everything in New York seems to merit preserving. If it's not historical, it's personal. If it's not personal, it's cultural. But you can't. You can't save everything. You just have to pack it up in your brain and take it with you when you go.

Moving is easy, exciting, an adventure - when you're young. Later, not so much. I love Massachusetts, my old home. Sometimes, late at night, I even study the real estate ads in my old hometown. But it's not even a fantasy. My parents are both gone. The world I left doesn't exist anymore. Neither does the person I was.

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

Part of being in New York is being able to brag about what used to be there.

I sing 'Beirut' for what the city is for me, but I am also singing as an exile.

I move slowly, and I used to move fast. I miss that.

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

I only felt a cold wind blow while I tried to hang on to the past.

You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way.

The past which is not recoverable in any other way is embedded, as if in amber, in the music, and people can regain a sense of identity.

It is all falling indelibly into the past.

Time is never time at all. You can never ever leave without leaving a piece of youth. And our lives are forever changed. We will never be the same. The more you change, the less you feel.

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

That is the saddest part when you lose someone you love - that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, Is this the same person I lost? Maybe you lost more maybe less, then thousand different things that come from your memory or imagination - and you do not know which is which, which was true, which is false.

Don't think about what you've left behind.