Quotes about Memories

For parents, the days are long but the years are short.

What would it be like to be a white page, starting from the beginning with stories untold and memories unmade? To start with a blank slate and go from there?-Travis Thrasher, Broken

The girls chirped and chatted like uncaged warblers. They were delirious with joy... Intoxications of life's morning! Enchanted years! The wing of a dragonfly trembles! Oh, reader, whoever you may be, do you have such memories? Have you walked in the underbrush, pushing aside branches for the charming head behind you? Have you slid laughing, down some slope wet with rain, with the woman you loved?

It is painful to break the sad links to the past

Memories are our strength. When night attempts to return, we must light up the great dates, as we would light torches.

He kissed the handkerchief, inhaled its perfume, put it over his heart, against his flesh in the daytime, and at night went to sleep with it on his lips. I feel her whole soul in it! he exclaimed. The handkerchief belonged to the old gentleman, who had simply dropped it from his pocket.

There is still a certain grace in a dead festival. It has been happy.

I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)

During the twenty years of Odesseus' absence, the people of Ithaca retained many recollections of him but never felt nostalgia for him. Whereas Odysseus did suffer nostalgia, and remembered almost nothing. ..... For four long books of the Odyssey he had retraced in detail his adventures before the dazzled Phaeacians. But in Ithaca he was not a stranger, he was one of their own, so it never occurred to anyone to say, 'Tell us!

At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator's tale but rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the over-familiar banality of private life.

Mesmerized, all she can do is watch this piece of her life move off; all she can do is watch it and suffer. She is experiencing a brand-new feeling called nostalgia. That feeling, that irrepressible yearning to return, suddenly reveals to her the existence of the past, the power of the past, of her past; in the house of her life […] from now on her existence will be inconceivable without these feelings.

Men grow old, the end draws near, each moment becomes more and more valuable, and there is no time to waste over recollections.