Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

That which resembles most living one's life over again, seems to be to recall all the circumstances of it; and, to render this remembrance more durable, to record them in writing.

Seventeen, eh!" said Hagrid as he accepted a bucket-sized glass of wine from Fred. "Six years to the day we met, Harry, d’yeh remember it?" "Vaguely," said Harry, grinning up at him. "Didn’t you smash down the front door, give Dudley a pig’s tail, and tell me I was a wizard?" "I forge’ the details," Hagrid chortled.

Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.

A lot of artists use memories. A lot of prose writers, a lot of poets, a lot of songwriters, refer back to something. Generally it's all you've got, unless you're brilliant and can write totally in the now.

I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It's a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That's why I want to write a book.

I keep boxes filled with recuerdos - little memories that are in the form of pictures and events that I've written down. It's funny that I chose to write them in Spanish rather than English or Portuguese.

I like to write about the way things used to be and paint pictures of my memories with beautiful words and melodies.

We pencil-sketch our previous life so we can contrast it to the technicolor of the moment.

From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged / In rambling talk with an image of air: / Vague memories, nothing but memories.

A dreamer of the common dreams, A fisher in familiar streams, He chased the transitory gleams That all pursue; But on his lips the eternal themes Again were new.

Reading has always been a major part of my life. It has broadened my world and taken me to places I would otherwise have never seen. Now that I am a hundred years old (this September) it still takes me to the outside world I can no longer visit.

Time has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved. You find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree.

...the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you. This is half the reason for the cure: It clean-sweeps; it makes the past, and all its pain, distant, like the barest impression on sparkling glass.

The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable.

Memories are contrary things; if you quit chasing them and turn your back, they often return on their own.

To an old memory like mine the present days are but as a little water poured on the deep.

All wines are by their very nature full of reminiscence, the golden tears and red blood of summers that are gone.

Back on its golden hinges The gate of Memory swings, And my heart goes into the garden And walks with the olden things.

These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me.

Having lost our present and our future, we had of necessity to bend all our endeavors to the past, which no one could take from us if only we were vigilant enough.

Still, looking through the old volumes was soothing, because thinking of the past made the present seem a little less real.

From early on I valued the gift of memory above all others. I understood that as we grow older we carry a whole nation around inside of us, places and ways that have disappeared, believing that they are ours, that we alone hold the torch for our past, that we are as impenetrable as stone.

Memories were fine but you couldn't touch them, smell them or hold them. They were never exactly as the moment was, and they faded with time.