Mike Watt Quotes

Things don't fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept.

But I think it's important that things endure.

A cello was there 400 years ago and will still be here in 400 years.

I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe.

Things that came before, people and things and experiences - that does mean something to me. It doesn't mean I don't embrace the new, but I don't forget the past, either.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

I've given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.

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.

France is an old country that does not forget.

History takes time... History makes memory.

The past is a present force.

The stuff that's good is the stuff that lives on.

Everything that has been is eternal: the sea will wash it up again.

The past always sort of haunts us and perhaps inspires us in some ways.

The heart never forgets, never gives up, the territory marked off for those who came before.

That lasting things do, in fact, last.

Remember Old Nan's stories, Bran. Remember the way she told them, the sound of her voice. So long as you do that, part of her will always be alive in you.

The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good, and what could be again.

Words are the only things that last for ever.

...and our footsteps rang and echoed till it sounded like the room was full of dancers, the house calling up all the people who had danced here across centuries of spring evenings, gallant girls seeing gallant boys off to war, old men and women straight-backed while outside their world disintegrated and the new one battered at their doors, all of them bruised and all of them laughing, welcoming us into their long lineage.

Someday we'll all be gone, but lullabies go on and on / They never die, that's how you and I will be

With smoking axle hot with speed, with steeds of fire and steam, Wide-waked To-day leaves Yesterday behind him like a dream. Still, from the hurrying train of Life, fly backward far and fast The milestones of the fathers, the landmarks of the past. But human hearts remain unchanged: the sorrow and the sin, The loves and hopes and fears of old, are to our own akin; And if, in tales our fathers told, the songs our mothers sung, Tradition wears a snowy beard, Romance is always young.

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.