“The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.”
Source: The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One
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Guy De Maupassant 59
French writer 1850–1893Related quotes

“For me, art has neither past nor future. All I have ever made was for the present.”
Quote in "Picasso", Hans L. C. Jaffe, Thames and Hudson Ltd
Attributed from posthumous publications

Source: "Some Perplexities about time: with an attempted solution" (1925), p. 149. as cited in: Jonathan Gorman, "The transmission of our understanding of historical time." Historia Social y de la Educación 1.2 (2012): 129-152.

Source: So I think, so I paint (1947), p. 14; Cited in: Maurizio Scudiero, David Leiber, Fortunato Depero (1986) Depero futurista & New York: il futurismo e l'arte pubblicitaria, p. 112
"Sometimes", § 7
Red Bird (2008)
Context: Death waits for me, I know it, around
one corner or another.
This doesn't amuse me.
Neither does it frighten me. After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.
It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.
I walked slowly, and listened to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

“The future for me is already a thing of the past.”
Song lyrics, Love and Theft (2001), Bye and Bye
Source: Bob Dylan - Love and Theft: Piano/Vocal/Guitar
Inner Freedom: A Spiritual Journey for Prison Inmates (2008)
“There was no future and no past. The present was eternity.”
Statement about perceptions he experienced in early clinical experiments with LSD. How Do We Know Who We Are? : A Biography of the Self (1997)