Stephen Spender Quotes

It is lost, lovely child, somewhere in the ragbag that I laughingly refer to as my memory.

A person without a memory is either a child or an amnesiac. A country without a memory is neither a child nor an amnesiac, but neither is it a country.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

When you begin to think about the past, you realize how much of it is lost to us.

Over time, I've paid attention, taken notes and forgotten easily half of everything I've gone through.

I remember that as I was writing a poem on 'Snow' when I was eight, I said aloud, 'I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now when I am little, because when I grow up, I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like.'

Experience had taught me that even the most precious memories fade with the passage of time.

The young remember most deeply.... When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly.

The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.

memories fall apart too.

Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting: So were it with me if forgetting could be willed. Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring, Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.

For children, Christmas is anticipation. For adults, Christmas is memory.

The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.

To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.

And so there would always be more to remember that could no longer be seen...our history is always returning to a little patch of weeds and saplings with an old chimney sticking up by itself...and here I look ahead to the resting of my case: I love the house that belonged to the chimney, holding it bright in memory, and love the saplings and the weeds.

I think everyone must have a first memory of some house, some room, a vivid picture that will remain deep down in one forever.

Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.

Remembrances last longer than present realities.

Oak, granite, Lilies by the road, Remember me? I remember you. Clouds brushing Clover hills, Remember me? Sister, child, Grown tall, Remember me? I remember you.

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

A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.

She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love-- nothing, now, but bones.

When you smell our candles burning, what does it make you think of, my child?" Winterfell, she might have said. I smell snow and smoke and pine needles. I smell the stables. I smell Hodor laughing, and Jon and Robb battling in the yard, and Sansa singing about some stupid lady fair. I smell the crypts where the stone kings sit. I smell hot bread baking. I smell the godswood. I smell my wolf. I smell her fur, almost as if she were still beside me. "I don't smell anything," she said.

As ephemeral as our footprints were in the sand along the river, so also were those moments of childhood caught in the photographs. And so will be our family itself, our marriage, the children who enriched it and the love that has carried us through so much. All this will be gone. What we hope will remain are these pictures, telling our brief story.