James Whitcomb Riley Quotes

The dearest days in one's life are those that seem very far and very near at once.

If you think back to your first love, you always remember them and little things always remind you of them.

All my life, Following Care along the dusty road, Have I looked back on loveliness and sighed.

But I didn't frame it; I put into an envelope and sealed it and stuffed it far back into a corner drawer of a filing cabinet. It's there, just in case one of these days I start to lose her. There might be a morning when I wake up and her face isn't the first thing I see. Or a lazy August afternoon when I can't quite recall anymore where the freckles were on her right shoulders. Maybe one of these days, I will not be able to listen to the sound of snow falling and hear her footsteps.

For me, I still have feelings for all of my ex-girlfriends. In different parts of my life, I would miss that person. There's something that drew me to that person, and I shared something with them.

It's funny how you never think about the women you've had. It's always the ones who get away that you can't forget.

The things hardest to bear are sweetest to remember.

Back to him she would never go, but in her lonely life still lived the sweet memory of that happy time when she believed in him and he was all in all to her.

Quite like old times,' the room says.

Home should be an oratorio of the memory, singing to all our after life melodies and harmonies of old-remembered joy.

How evanescent those loves and friendships seem at this distance in time…We move on, make new attachments. We grow old. But sometimes, we hanker for old friendships, the old loves. Sometimes I wish I was young again. Or that I could travel back in time and pick up the threads. Absent so long, I may have stopped loving you, friends; but I will never stop loving the Day I loved you.

He thinks about her, at this moment, in her house, a few thin walls away, packing her life into boxes and bags and he wonders what memories she is rediscovering, what thoughts are catching in her mouth like the dust blown from unused textbooks. He wonders if she has buried any traces of herself under her floorboards. He wonders what those traces would be if she had. And he wonders again why he thinks about her so much when he knows so little to think about.

When you get to be my age there are more and more people you have known that you miss. Brion [Gysin], Antony Balch, Ian Summerville are ones I think of right away I was quite close to.

In my heart, I'm always in my rail-hosen.

Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?

Friends depart, and memory takes them To her caverns, pure and deep.

And so there would always be more to remember that could no longer be seen...our history is always returning to a little patch of weeds and saplings with an old chimney sticking up by itself...and here I look ahead to the resting of my case: I love the house that belonged to the chimney, holding it bright in memory, and love the saplings and the weeds.

Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Shall memory restore The steps and the shore, The face and the meeting place.

I'm a nostalgic person and I really like rehashing and digging around the mental trunks.

I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys.

Things you did. Things you never did. Things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.

That lovely voice; how I should weep for joy if I could hear it now!

Remembering the ball became for Emma a daily occupation. Every time Wednesday came round, she told herself when she woke up: 'Ah! One week ago...two weeks ago...three weeks ago, I was there!' And, little by little, in her memory, the faces all blurred together; she forgot the tunes of the quadrilles; no longer could she so clearly picture the liveries and the rooms; some details disappeared, but the yearning remained.

I have a thousand images of you in an hour; all different and all coming back to the same. I think of you once against a sky line: and on the hill that Sunday morning. The light and the shadow and quietness and the rain and the wood. And you. Your arms and lips and hair and shoulders and voice - you.