Andre Aciman Quotes

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.

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

I'm living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.

Taste refers to the past, imagination to the future.

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.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.

I am not nostalgic for the past.

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

The good old days are now.

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.

Nostalgia is not a place to live.

Do we always grind through the present, doomed to throw a gold haze of fond retrospect over the past?

There's no future in our past. Just experience. We want to return to it, but we don't want to close the door on it either.

My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image.

Happiness in the present is only shattered by comparison with the past.

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.

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.

Nostalgia is, 'Hey, remember the other mall that used to be there?'

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.

You know when you're young you think you will always be. As you become more fragile, you reflect and you realize how much comfort can come from the past. Hymns can carry you into the future.

I don't have a great nostalgia for the past.

Human's can't live in the present as animals do; they just live in the present. But human's are always thinking about the future or the past.

What I find compelling is the moment in which people realize, with suffering and pain, that in the past there was a time when they were happy, because back then the present and the future coincided - they were one and the same thing.

Art is for entertainment purposes, but it's also to reflect our dreams, our hopes, the present, the future the past - whether it's good or bad.