W. G. Sebald Quotes

Call us the future from your past.

When you finally go back to your old home, you find it wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood.

When I look at pictures when I was younger, I do the quintessential cringe.

I don't like looking back.

I don't much like looking back.

We all have those dreams of going back in time and seeing what it was like when our parents were younger.

We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward, are dreams.

Remember the past - and await the future.

Do you remember we were sitting there by the water?

One of the reasons why old people make so many journeys into the past is to satisfy themselves that it is still there.

The past is never where you think you left it.

This is the place. Stand still, my steed,- Let me review the scene, And summon from the shadowy past The forms that once have been.

Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.

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

It's funny how close the past is, sometimes. Sometimes it seems as if you could almost reach out and touch it. Only who really wants to?

When his phone rang, he had to dig through his pocket to find it, and his fingers brushed against a pair of tiny earbuds he and Kat had last used in Monte Carlo. Hale smiled a little, realizing he hadn’t worn the tux in ages. It was just one of many ways his life had change in the years since a girl named Katarina Bishop crawled into his window and into his life." — Double Crossed by Ally Carter

But... what about us? What about the past?" she asks blankly. "The past isn't real. it's just a dream," I say. "Don't mention the past.

The past is what you take with you.

Having lost our present and our future, we had of necessity to bend all our endeavors to the past, which no one could take from us if only we were vigilant enough.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought.

Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.

The Past is such a curious Creature To look her in the Face A Transport may receipt us Or a Disgrace-.

One is always at home in one's past.

It's nine o'clock on a Saturday, the regular crowd shuffles in / There's an old man sitting next to me making love to his tonic and gin / He says, 'Son, can you play me a memory?/ I'm not really sure how it goes / But it's sad and it's sweet, and I knew it complete when I wore a younger man's clothes.'

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.