Arthur Golden Quotes

Past and to come, seems best; things present, worse.

Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of.

And while the future's there for anyone to change, still you know it's seems, It would be easier sometimes to change the past.

The future looks a bit bleak to me.

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.

I'm 65 years old. Everyday the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.

The older books were quite light-hearted. But I think most of my novels do end on a deep note of pessimism. Shadows seem to be closing in. The final conclusion isn't that life is wonderful and everything is bright and cheery and in the garden.

It may be that the seemingly intrinsic attraction that past time has for me is merely a desire for escapism, as I look out at the nation and world with little optimism.

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

If you aren't in the moment, you are either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret.

There is no past that we can bring back to us by the longing for it.

I only remember the future.

The future is kind of a bleak place.

Going home is not necessarily a wonderful experience. It always comes with a sense of loss and makes you so conscious of the inexorable passage of time.

If you live in the past, you've got no future.

Death at times seems like a dark tunnel to be traveled, and the future seems bleak.

You, yesterday, did the usual things, just as any day, You don't know if it's worth remembering. You would prefer to remember, there lying in the half-darkness of the bedroom, not what has happened already but what is going to happen. In your half-darkness your eyes would prefer to look ahead, not behind, and they do not know how to foresee the past.

Youth looks forward, for nothing is behind! Age backward, for nothing is before.

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")

For the majority of us, the past is a regret, the future an experiment

The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen.

Pessimism drops the curtain on tomorrow.

Life is the past, the present and the perhaps.

The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?" It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period. This is it: "Nothing.