Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

But it's far too late for us; ring, hair, letters, photographs - all traces of our love will be scattered then, like an anagram.

For me, I still have feelings for all of my ex-girlfriends. In different parts of my life, I would miss that person. There's something that drew me to that person, and I shared something with them.

People try to keep their past, like kind of holding on to their past. Every Springsteen song talks about that.

Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.

The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.

The past is never where you think you left it.

And, as always happens, and happens far too soon, the strange and wonderful becomes a memory and a memory becomes a dream. Tomorrow it's gone.

No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.

The memory fades, and I’m left hanging on to the ghosts of his words.

Memories are hunting horns whose sound dies on the wind.

If you must reread old love letters, better pick a room without mirrors.

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

Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.

My yesterdays are all boxed up and neatly put away.

I was looking at the photographs and I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories.

Remembering our past, carrying it around with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it.

Something I tried to hold onto, to touch if only for a moment, but it slipped away from me like the air, like an illusion, or a dream that floats away and is lost. I wept in my sleep as though it was something I was losing now; a loss I was experiencing for the first time, and not something I had lost a long time ago.

I love the rain - it washes memories off the sidewalk of life.

I have a beautiful address book a friend gave me in 1966. I literally cannot open it again. Ever. It sits on the shelf with over a hundred names crossed out. What is there to say? There are no words. I'll never understand why it happened to us.

How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire

My face carries all of my memories. Why would I erase them?

I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods.

The past--the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather-all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been. He did not remember.

That mirror, that's one I hate to let go, he said. That was my daughter's the whole time she was growing up. It probably seen her more than me--everything from a baby up to twenty years old. Sometimes I wonder if all that might still be inside it. Got to make an impression on a thing, reflecting the same person every day.

The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.