And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond...

‎”She was not a little girl heart-broken about him; she was a grown woman smiling at it all, but they were wet smiles.

… so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the...

He stood with his two frail hands on his cane and his eyes closed, and breathed in deeply the scent of the past. “Sometimes,” he sighed, “I think the things I remember are more real...

The fifties are a peaceful time, a quiet sleeping time between two noisy bursts of years, a blue and white time filled with sweet yellow days, music and bright smelling memories.

But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted only by an exercise of the will, by my intellectual memory, and since the pictures which that kind of memory shews...

I “dated” one boy and our song was “Faithfully” by Journey. Every time it played my body would turn electric, and I would stare out whatever window I was near and reminisce about experiences I...

How did he get here? What drew him back? Easy answer: the monkey bars. Not-so-easy answer. . . . What took him away in the first place? Gyroscopic deflections are only partly to blame. Who...

Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out...

Zo zal ik vertrekken’, zegt Germaine. ‘Ik ben het oude hart van een dorp waar niemand komt wonen. Ik zal stoppen met kloppen en het weinige wat ik heb gekend en nog niet is verdwenen,...

The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.

Keeping busy is the hardest part. When I find myself still, clear of thoughts, I can still feel you holding me.

Sometimes, I miss so much the person that I was before the world tore me up in so many places. If only “they” could have just let me stay that way.

To want to tackle everything rationally is irrational.

Ich hab’ noch einen Koffer in Berlin.

I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it...

But I remember the place with fondness … not perfect but, all in all, not a bad memory.

Ah God! to see the branches stirAcross the moon at Grantchester!To smell the thrilling-sweet and rottenUnforgettable, unforgottenRiver-smell, and hear the breeze Sobbing in the little trees.Say, do the elm-clumps greatly standStill guardians of that holy...

The Old Days, the Lost Days — in the half-closed eyes of memory (and in fact) they never marched across a calendar; they huddled round a burning log, leaned on a certain table, or listened...

If I could go back would I do it differently? Well, I can’t go back.

I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.

Let’s create a new memory,where our futures will fall back for strength

If I had known how much I would miss these sensations I might have experienced them differently, recognized their shabby glamour, respected the ticking clock that defined this entire experience. I would have put aside...

i have laughedmore than daffodilsand cried more than June.

How embarrassing that she ever did something that silly. But, good God, she was seventeen. At that age, we’re mostly high-pitched and crazy. All urgent chemicals raging around the blood course. And that’s why we...

Back then, come July, and the blazers would again make their way out of the steel trunks and evenings would be spent looking at snow-capped mountains from our terrace and spotting the first few lights...

The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.

[O]ne has to have endured a few decades before wanting, let alone needing, to embark on the project of recovering lost life. And I think it may be possible to review ‘the chronicles of wasted...

That was our first home. Before I felt like an island in an ocean, before Calcutta, before everything that followed. You know it wasn’t a home at first but just a shell. Nothing ostentatious but...

There were so many of these moments that could never be captured accurately, even in the camcorder, only in the heart.

The cloudless day is richer at its close;A golden glory settles on the lea;Soft, stealing shadows hint of cool reposeTo mellowing landscape, and to calming sea.And in that nobler, gentler, lovelier light,The soul to sweeter,...