Time is but memory in the making.

Quote of the Week 28

“Time is but memory in the making.”

― Vladimir Nabokov

As cited in Recursion by Blake Crouch.

Context as provided in Nabokov's interview with BBC-2 in 1969:

     Let  me  quote  a  paragraph  in   my   book   Ada:
"Physiologically  the  sense  of  Time is a sense of continuous
becoming. . . . Philosophically, on the other hand, Time is but
memory in the making. In every individual life there  goes  on,
from  cradle to deathbed, the gradual shaping and strengthening
of that backbone of consciousness, which is the Time  of
the  strong."  This  is  Van  speaking,  Van Veen, the charming
villain of mv book. I have not decided yet if I agree with  him
in all his view's on the texture of time. I suspect I don't.

 

See Restoration of time: Henry Bergson and Vladimir Nabokov for an exploration of Nabokov's notion of time, viewing it through the lens of Henri Bergson’s philosophy. According to Nabokov “time is essentially memory in the process of its unfolding”. 

 

Related quotes on time:

Quote of the Week 4/2024

"Time exists so that everything doesn’t happen at once. 

  Space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you."

― Susan Sontag 

Quote of the Week 8/2023

"Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time."
― Jean-Michel Basquiat

Other quotes from the book Recursion:

“We are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
— Carson McCullers

“Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.”
— Ray Cummings

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
— George Orwell, 1984

“When a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past .  .  . All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.”
— Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
— Søren Kierkegaard