Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes

Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

You know when you're young you think you will always be. As you become more fragile, you reflect and you realize how much comfort can come from the past. Hymns can carry you into the future.

Certain experiences you never forget, no matter how old you become.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

Writers and believers live their lives haunted by the same question: What happens to our days once they disappear? The objective fact is that each day that passes is lost forever, as forbidden to us as the dead. But prayer and fiction offer a different answer. Those lost days still live among us, written in each person's hand, turned into stories.

I've given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

We are tomorrow's past.

History takes time... History makes memory.

Imagine there wasn't photography. Where would we be? How would I remember what I looked like as a kid? It links us all. It keeps us all together; it's what our history is.

I'm 78. We've lost a lot of our great stars. I can't hang out with those who aren't here. The phone service to Heaven is so bad, you know. But I get to visit with their memories.

Everyone has ways of trying to find a way to memorise our past. There's something very poetic about that.

My generation is now the door to memory. That is why I am remembering.

What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories.

Promise you won't forget me, ever. Not even when I'm a hundred.

If we seek to keep the past alive, we end, I think, by distorting it.

When my wife's Aunt Caroline was in her nineties, she lived with us, and she once remarked: 'Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.' I cherish the remembrance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave, compulsive word.

I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago, and of people who will see a world that I shall never know.

The golden age of Luncheon Vouchers ended ten yearsago. For ten years Mickey had been saying, "The goldenage of Luncheon Vouchers is over." And that's what Archieloved about O'Connell's. Everything was remembered,nothing was lost. History was never revised orreinterpreted, adapted or whitewashed. It was as solid andas simple as the encrusted egg on the clock.

Perhaps that's how I should think of them, Polly thought, the troupe and Miss Snelgrove and Trot. And Sir Godfrey. Not as lost to her, but as removed to this moment in time for safekeeping.

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

Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?" Mo had said..."As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells...and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower...both strange and familiar.

I should like to freeze in time all those I do love, keep them somehow safe from the ravages of the passing years..."Rather like flowers pressed between the pages of a book!

I'm 47 now, and I'm at that stage where I'm still young but I'm not young. I'm not old but I'm getting old, and I have stuff at home that reminds me of people and places.