James Montgomery Quotes

But where are the snows of yester year?

The highest happiness, the purest joys of life, wear out at last.

Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.

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

It was as if all of the happiness, all of the magic of this blissful hour had flowed together into these stirring, bittersweet tones and flowed away, becoming temporal and transitory once more.

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.

We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.

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.

What better is there to sigh for than happiness, yesterday's or tomorrow's.

Joy and sorrow are both my perpetual companions, but the joy is called Past and the sorrow Present.

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")

Heaven and earth conspire that everything which has been, be rooted and reduced to dust. Only the dreamers, who dream while awake, call back the shadows of the past and braid nets from the unspun thread.

A lively retrospect summons back to us once more our youth, with vivid reflex of its early joys and unstained pleasures.

Attainment is followed by neglect, possession by disgust, and the malicious remark of the Greek epigrammatist on marriage may be applied to many another course of life, that its two days of happiness are the first and the last

I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning then. Would you?

Haven't laughed this hard in a long time. I better stop now before I start crying. Go off to sleep in the sunshine...I don't want to see the day when its dying.

Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.

In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.

I think people live in the past and tend to look that way, because they drop off when they're happiest and most successful.

Simple pleasures were all the pleasures that I knew as a child.

When a small child, I thought that success spelled happiness. I was wrong, happiness is like a butterfly which appears and delights us for one brief moment, but soon flits away.

Yesterday's just a memory, tomorrow is never what it's supposed to be.

I remember as a kid having a balloon and accidentally letting the string go and watching it just float off and into the sky until it disappeared. And there's something about that, even, that feels very much like what life is, you know, that it's fleeting, and it's temporal.