Wit & Attitude Quote by David Gerrold

Memory is inevitable; nostalgia is a choice with consequences. Gerrold’s line snaps that distinction into focus with a tidy little booby trap: it opens tenderly ("I have memories") and then yanks the reader away from sentimentality ("but only a fool..."). The dash functions like a moral pivot, turning a confession into an indictment. He’s not rejecting the past; he’s rejecting the habit of converting it into a long-term lease on the present.

"Stores his past in the future" is the key metaphor, and it’s quietly brutal. Storing implies hoarding, warehousing, treating experience as inventory. The future becomes less a frontier than a closet you keep stuffing with old boxes: grudges, golden eras, outdated identities, trauma you rehearse until it feels like fate. Gerrold’s phrasing also suggests a category error: the future is not a safe-deposit box for what already happened. Try to pack it that way and you guarantee clutter, not continuity.

As a working science-fiction writer, Gerrold is steeped in narratives where time is pliable and tomorrow is a design problem. This line reads like a genre-aware warning: the most common time travel fantasy isn’t a machine, it’s the psyche replaying what it lost and calling that "preparation". The subtext is pragmatic, even slightly impatient: remember, yes. Learn, yes. But don’t confuse remembering with living. The future demands invention, not archival management.