Jeanette Winterson Quotes

The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future too.

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.

And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.

Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank you would sit and watch its flowing. Yet the timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness, And knows that 'yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream.

time past and time future what might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present.

The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.

I have a mantra that kind of explains my feelings on this subject, which is, "The past is the present is the future." When you're recording something, you're making something that will exist in the future.

The mind exists in time, in fact the mind is time; it exists in the past and the future. And remember, time consists of only two tenses, the past and the future. The present is not part of time, the present is part of eternity.

Time is an illusion. Time only exists when we think about the past and the future. Time doesn't exist in the present here and now.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today.

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.

When you are in the future, the past looks different.

There can be neither today without yesterday nor tomorrow without today.

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

Not only is the past of a person with no memory inaccessible; his ability to think about the future is imperilled. Time travel, then, is ultimately - and paradoxically - an exercise in remembering. And without that capacity it simply cannot exist.

The present moment dies every moment to become the past , is reborn every moment into the future. All experience is now. Now never ends.

Live both in the future and the past. Who does not live in the past does not live in the future.

We live in the present, we dream of the future and we learn eternal truths from the past.

The Past, the Future, O dear, is from you; you should regard both these as one.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

Death is alive, they whispered. Death lives inside life, as bones dance within the body. Yesterday is within today. Yesterday never dies.

Today is, after all, today, but yesterday is of the same substance as tomorrow.

this present moment never comes to be and it never ceases to be, it is simply our minds that construct the continuity of thoughts we call time. In the present moment is nirvana.

PAST, n. That part of Eternity with some small fraction of which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance... The Past is the Future of yesterday, the Future is the Past of to-morrow. They are one - the knowledge and the dream.