Time Shelter

Somewhere in the Andes, they believe to this very day that the future is behind you. It comes up from behind your back, surprising and unforeseeable, while the past is always before your eyes, that which has already happened. When they talk about the past, the people of the Aymara tribe point in front of them. You walk forward facing the past and you turn back toward the future.

We are constantly producing the past. We are factories for the past. Living past-making machines, what else? We eat time and produce the past. Even death doesn’t put a stop to this. A person might be gone, but his past remains.

He has no friends, no living relatives. No one to call. If we are not in someone else’s memory, do we even exist at all?

In the end, writing arises when man realizes that memory is not enough.

Forgetting takes a lot of work. You have to constantly remember that you are supposed to forget something. Surely, that's how every ideology functions.

When you have no future, you vote for the past.

Time feeds on us. We are food for time.

There is no time machine except the human being.

Now the last person who remembered me as a child is gone, I told myself. And only then did I burst into sobs, like a child.

The past settles into afternoons, that’s where time visibly slows down, it dozes off in the corners, blinking like a cat looking through thin blinds. It’s always afternoon when you remember something, at least that’s how it is for me. Everything is in the light.

no longer remember who said that a nation was a group of people who have agreed to jointly remember and forget the same things.

I'm getting old. Exiled ever further from the Rome of childhood in the distant empty provinces of old age, from which there is no return. And Rome no longer answers my letters. Somewhere the past exists as a house or a street that you've left for a short while, for five minutes, and you've found yourself in a strange city. It's been written that the past is a foreign country. Nonsense. The past is my home country. The future is a foreign country, full of strange faces, I won't set foot there. Let me go back home... my mother told me not to be late.

You can't make a museum to preserve something that has never left.

The things I do not dare to do will transform into stories.

Everything always comes down to language in the end.

The past is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which you just imagined.

I remember, of course, several particularly important silences, but I have no way of retelling those.

In fact, the first thing that goes in memory loss is the very concept of the future.

In the end, in the referendum people chose the years when they were young....There was a certain injustice in that - choosing the time the next generation would live in. As happens in all elections, actually.

It's well known that our inept homegrown police of all eras have always shown unerring taste in poets and writers - they always manage to kill the most talented and leave the most mediocre.

The past grows like a weed.

There was a certain injustice in that — choosing the time the next generation would live in. As happens in all elections, actually.

It’s nice to know your home country so well that you can leave it shortly before the trap springs.