Berenice Abbott Quotes

Traditionally, photography is supposed to capture an event that has passed; but that is not what I'm looking for. Photography brings the past into the present when you look at it.

I am not a picture guy. I like to live in the present and keep the image of the past vivid in my mind. I don't need the precision of the picture.

Legends are all to do with the past and nothing to do with the present.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

The now, the here, through which all future plunges into the past.

Photography is a form of time travel.

Yesterday's the past, tomorrow's the future, but today is a gift. That's why it's called the present.

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

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

Essentially what photography is is life lit up.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have.

We must discard the past in order to find a remedy for the evils of the present.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.

I think memory is essential to what we are. If we - we wouldn't be able to talk to each other without memory. And what we think of as the present really is the past. It is made out of the past.

I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant.

A photograph is a moment - when you press the button, it will never come back.

The only thing simple about the past is that it's not now.

Who controls the present controls the past. There's a power structure, if you like, between the present and the past and the future, and that's what I'm interested in.

The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.

Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.