George MacDonald Quotes

The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.

Don't think about what you've left behind. If what one finds is made of pure matter, it will never spoil. And one can always come back. If what you had found was only a moment of light, like the explosion of a star, you would find nothing on your return.

There is nothing steadfast in life but our memories. We are sure of keeping intact only that which we have lost.

Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.

The good times of today, are the sad thoughts of tomorrow.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

Time never stood still for me. It went too fast; that was the bad thing about it!

The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.

They say that Hope is happiness But genuine Love must prize the past; And Mem'ry wakes the thoughts that bless: They rose first -- they set the last. And all that mem'ry loves the most Was once our only hope to be: And all that hope adored and lost Hath melted into memory. Alas! It is delusion all-- The future cheats us from afar: Nor can we be what we recall, Nor dare we think on what we are.

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

But that was the best time of my life, and only now that it has gone from me forever -- only now do I realize it.

What we have never had, remains; It is the things we have that go.

The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.

You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.

Because it is senior year I have begun to see things as potential absences. The things I love will become the things I'll miss.

This is the time to remember cause it will not last forever. These are the days to hold onto cause we won't although we'll want to.

Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time.

By the time I recognize this moment, this moment will be gone. . . But I will bend the light, pretend that it somehow lingered on

We studied our angels for a few moments more, looking at where we had lain side by side in that sweet, quiet moment. I wished what I’d said was true, that we had truly left our mark on the mountain. But I knew that after the next snowfall, our angels would disappear into the whiteness and be nothing more than a memory.

as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.