Memories and Recollections

When you are old, at evening candlelit, Beside the fire bending to your wool, Read out my verse and murmur, “Ronsard writ This praise for me when I was beautiful.” 1

But, Lord Crist! whan that it remembreth me Upon my yowthe, and on my jolitee, It tikleth me aboute myn herte roote. Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote That I have had my world as in my tyme.

You’re 2 walking by the tomb of Battiades, Who knew well how to write poetry, and enjoy Laughter at the right moment, over the wine.

A sweet thing, for whatever time, to revisit in dreams the dear dead we have lost.

Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies, and soon their places will know them no more, and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to “keep” by force of inertia.

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

It is human to exaggerate the merits of the dead.

I find that the further I go back, the better things were, whether they happened or not.

Memories which someday will become all beautiful when the last annoyance that encumbers them shall have faded out of our minds.

It will take mind and memory months and possibly years to gather together the details, and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss.

I've seen many troubles in my time, only half of which ever came true.

When someone dies, it is like when your house burns down; it isn't for years that you realize the full extent of your loss.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

My memory was never loaded with anything but blank cartridges.

If you tell the truth you do not need a good memory!

That which was hard to endure is sweet to remember.

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

What is human life? The first third a good time; the rest remembering about it.

I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.

The inability to forget is far more devastating than the inability to remember.

The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened.

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

Things that are separate shall be united and acquire such virtue that they will restore to man his lost memory.

It is no small benefit on finding oneself in bed in the dark to go over again in the imagination the main lines of the forms previously studied, or other 103 noteworthy things conceived by ingenious speculation.