“Time Does Not Bring Relief Time does not bring relief; you all have lied Who told me time would ease me of my pain! I miss him in the weeping of the rain; I want him at the shrinking of the tide; The old snows melt from every mountain-side, And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane; But last year’s bitter loving must remain Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide. There are a hundred places where I fear To go,—so with his memory they brim. And entering with relief some quiet place Where never fell his foot or shone his face I say, “There is no memory of him here!” And so stand stricken, so remembering him.”
“The things we do outlast our mortality. The things we do are like monuments that people build to honor heroes after they ve died. They re like the pyramids that the Egyptians built to honor the pharaohs. Only instead of being made of stone, they re made out of the memories people have of you.”
“How do you know when it s over? Maybe when you feel more in love with your memories than with the person standing in front of you.”
“Songs and smells will bring you back to a moment in time more than anything else. It s amazing how much can be conjured with a few notes of a song or a solitary whiff of a room. A song you didn t even pay attention to at the time, a place that you didn t even know had a particular smell.”
“People always talk about how hard it can be to remember things - where they left their keys, or the name of an acquaintance - but no one ever talks about how much effort we put into forgetting. I am exhausted from the effort to forget... There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.”
“Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little.”
“I ve apparently been the victim of growing up, which apparently happens to all of us at one point or another. It s been going on for quite some time now, without me knowing it. I ve found that growing up can mean a lot of things. For me, it doesn t mean I should become somebody completely new and stop loving the things I used to love. It means I ve just added more things to my list. Like for example, I m still beyond obsessed with the winter season and I still start putting up strings of lights in September. I still love sparkles and grocery shopping and really old cats that are only nice to you half the time. I still love writing in my journal and wearing dresses all the time and staring at chandeliers. But some new things I ve fallen in love with -- mismatched everything. Mismatched chairs, mismatched colors, mismatched personalities. I love spraying perfumes I used to wear when I was in high school. It brings me back to the days of trying to get a close parking spot at school, trying to get noticed by soccer players, and trying to figure out how to avoid doing or saying anything uncool, and wishing every minute of every day that one day maybe I d get a chance to win a Grammy. Or something crazy and out of reach like that. ;) I love old buildings with the paint chipping off the walls and my dad s stories about college. I love the freedom of living alone, but I also love things that make me feel seven again. Back then naivety was the norm and skepticism was a foreign language, and I just think every once in a while you need fries and a chocolate milkshake and your mom. I love picking up a cookbook and closing my eyes and opening it to a random page, then attempting to make that recipe. I ve loved my fans from the very first day, but they ve said things and done things recently that make me feel like they re my friends -- more now than ever before. I ll never go a day without thinking about our memories together.”
“Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal. From an Irish headstone”
“I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them...”
“Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through is now like something from the distant past. We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about everyday, too many new things we have to learn. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.”
“The worst memories stick with us, while the nice ones always seem to slip through our fingers.”
“Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you ll find an edge to cut you.”
“The hardest thing about the road not taken is that you never know where it might have led.”
“People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.”
“Remembering is easy. It s forgetting that s hard.”
“Sometimes, he sighed, I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see. ”
“Sharing tales of those we ve lost is how we keep from really losing them.”