Rebecca Solnit Quotes

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.

I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.

Perhaps it's true you can't go back in time, but you can return to the scene of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fateful decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal.

There is no distance on this earth as far away as yesterday.

Things you did. Things you never did. Things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.

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.

As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.

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.

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

I keep my scrapbooks in the car. When I come to a stoplight, I start looking through my past. Sometimes I wish the red lights were longer.

I'm just fascinated by the past. You know, both by the possibilities it holds and by the complete tyranny of it, the way it sort of keeps you in this stranglehold and makes you want things that you no longer have and you can never get back.

You know how it is. Every time you kiss someone else, in a way you always remember that very first time.

People try to keep their past, like kind of holding on to their past. Every Springsteen song talks about that.

Every play I write is about love and distance. And time. And from that we can get things like history.

Music makes time fall away like almost nothing else. You hear a song from another moment of your life, and it really is like you're still there.

I love nostalgia.

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.

memory is the only way home.

You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!

The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.

The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.

Our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of the past.

We possess nothing certainly except the past

She went out and took a last long look at the shabby little library. She knew she would never see it again. Eyes changed after they looked at new things. If in the years to be she were to come back, her new eyes might make everything seem different from the way she saw it now. The way it was now was the way she wanted to remember it.