Richard Paul Evans Quotes

Oh, everything is gorgeous once it's gone.

We all yearn for what we have lost. But sometimes, we forget what we have.

He has no idea how beautiful the ordinary becomes once it disappears.

In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

When I have plucked the rose, I cannot give it vital growth again, It needs must wither. I'll smell it on the tree.

... but that's what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.

We do not realize what we have on Earth until we leave it.

The mind that is wise mourns less for what age takes away; than what it leaves behind.

I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine - you mourn things that actually happened.

I hold Mad Season very fondly to my heart, and there's a lot of sadness in that, too.

When you go somewhere and think it will be your last time there, you always appreciate the beauty of it even more and want to crystallise emotions that you will keep with you forever.

It's just a fact of life that you don't realize what you've got until it's gone.

I never had one of those glorious young bodies that make older men and women weep. So I don't tend to look back with nostalgia or yearn for what I've lost. Because it was never all that.

The ancients waited for cherry blossoms, grieved when they were gone, and lamented their passing in countless poems. How very ordinary the poems had seemed to Sachiko when she read them as a girl, but now she knew, as well as one could know, that grieving over fallen cherry blossoms was more than a fad or convention.

Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone.

They say that Hope is happiness But genuine Love must prize the past; And Mem'ry wakes the thoughts that bless: They rose first -- they set the last. And all that mem'ry loves the most Was once our only hope to be: And all that hope adored and lost Hath melted into memory. Alas! It is delusion all-- The future cheats us from afar: Nor can we be what we recall, Nor dare we think on what we are.

For it falls out That what we have we prize not to the worth Whiles we enjoy it, but being lacked and lost, Why, then we rack the value, then we find The virtue that possession would not show us While it was ours.

The weak grey light that serves as harbinger of red and golden dawn faintly lit my window. I fumbled for a candle, found and lit it, and by its little light saw that the rose floating in the bowl was dying. It had already lost most of its petals, which floated on the water like tiny, un-seaworthy boats, deserted for safer craft. "Dear God," I said. "I must go back at once.

The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

If I had my life to live over I would have burned the pink candle sculpted like a rose before it melted in storage.

It was strange how you didn’t realise how much you loved a place until you had lost it completely.

It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.

As we grow older we think more and more of old persons and of old things and places. As to old persons, it seems as if we never know how much they have to tell until we are old ourselves and they have been gone twenty or thirty years. Once in a while we come upon some survivor of his or her generation that we have overlooked, and feel as if we had recovered one of the lost books of Livy or fished up the golden candlestick from the ooze of the Tiber.

Well you only need the light when it's burning low, only miss the sun when it starts to snow.