Ella Wheeler Wilcox Quotes

Music is...a form of remembering, a return to the seasons of the heart long gone.

Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.

Time has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved. You find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree.

Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees ... one's happiness, one's reality?

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

Recordar: To remember; from the Latin records, to pass back through the heart

Remembrance is to the heart what water is to the fish. And what is the state of a fish that leaves water?

I keep my scrapbooks in the car. When I come to a stoplight, I start looking through my past. Sometimes I wish the red lights were longer.

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.

Nostalgia is not a place to live.

I do enjoy thinking about the past.

What's gone will never come back, but it exists when you think of it.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.

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.

The past scampers like an alley cat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter.

All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.

Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.

Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it only then for the first time.

I explore it now in the only place left for it, my memory.

Nowadays he doesn't think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought.

Remembrance of things past.

I think you can only be nostalgic for something you've lost.