I cling to my memories of glorious desperation.
The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.
The melancholia of everything completed!
Years have passed and how I am anxiously watching the twilight of my childhood, quietly sinking, never to rise again.
That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back at what we destroyed, what we tore away from that self who could do more, and its work that's become my enemy because that's what I can tell you about, that Youth who could do anything.
Imperceptibly, more time passes when I'm not remembering our every moment together, not recreating our every conversation, re-imagining our love-making. It is immeasurably sad.
When looking back, usually I'm more sorry for the things I didn't do than for the things I shouldn't have done.
Sweet Memory! wafted by thy gentle gale, Oft up the stream of Time I turn my sail.
And even if these scenes from our youth were given back to us we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might be amongst them and move in them; we might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in the memory; but the man himself it is not.
Let me tell you a few things about regret. There is no end to it. Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?
We see these adolescents mourning for a lost childhood.
When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.
Sweet memory, wafted by the gentle gale, Oft up the stream of Time I turn my sail, To view the fairy haunts of long-lost hours, Blest with far greener shades, far fresher flowers.
So in the heart, When, fading slowly down the past, Fond memories depart, And each that leaves it seems the last; Long after all the rest are flown, Returns a solitary tone,— The after-echo of departed years,— And touches all the soul to tears.
True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.
The glamour Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance.
Like the withered roses of a once gay garland, the feelings of youth command in age a melancholy interest.
Every time I open the drawer, it's a trip down Memory Lane, which, if you don't turn off at the right exit, merges straight into the Masochistic Nostalgia Highway.
In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.
It is a curious fact that in bad days we can very vividly recall the good time that is now no more; but that in good days, we have only a very cold and imperfect memory of the bad.
