Memories and Recollections

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.

The scene of suffering is a scene of joy when the suffering is past; and the silent reminiscence of hardships departed, is sweeter than the presence of delight

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

My attachment has neither the blindness of the beginning— nor the microscopic accuracy of the close of such liaisons.

Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.

There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one’s parents.

Each man’s memory is his private literature, and every recollection affects us with something of the penetrative force that belongs to the work of art.

The warehouse of that memory is called the library.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer.

Every reminiscence is colored by today’s being what it is, and therefore by a deceptive point of view.

For old, unhappy, far-off things,

On that best portion of a good man’s life,

For oft, when on my couch I lie

I have lost friends, some by death … others through sheer inability to cross the street.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

Sing me a song of a lad that is gone, Say, could that lad be I?

Music, when soft voices die,

Better by far you should forget and smile