George MacDonald Fraser Quotes

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 can't believe I'm 29. Where did the years go? Why did the years go?

Every day in a life fills the whole life with expectations and memory.

I came in 11 years ago. I remember it like it was tomorrow

I still preserve those relics of past sufferings and experience, like pillars of witness set up in travelling through the valve of life, to mark particular occurrences. The footsteps are obliterated now; the face of the country may be changed; but the pillar is still there, to remind me how all things were when it was reared.

Even one's yesterdays could not continue to stir and move in a man's mind unless there were a future for those yesterdays to make.

The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.

Fifty years," I hackneyed, "is a long time." "Not when you're looking back at them," she said. "You wonder how they vanished so quickly.

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.

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.

I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head.

I'm in a position to look back at my life, and I realized there were a number of experiences that needed to be documented.

You look back and you remember the good, the bad and the ugly.

The notion of time bothers me. You look at thirty-year-old photographs and realize how the time has passed.

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.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.

That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.

I'm not particularly fond of the past, but I do ramble on about it quite a bit.

So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination to look back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, grows upon most of us.

I keep a diary when I have time to. I always know that I'm either having a great time or I'm very busy when there are three weeks of nothing in my diary. But I like to look back because in ten years to the day I can know where I was and what I was doing, and that's a nice feeling.

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

Memory is the best of all gardens. Therein, winter and summer, the seeds of their past lie dormant, ready to spring into instant bloom at any moment the mind wishes to bring them to life.

It is hard to look back and talk about a set of disjointed experiences as though they were part of one smooth progression.

All those years and their moments— Crackling bacon, slamming car doors, Poems tried out on friends, Will be one more archive, One more shaky text.

I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.