Daniel Handler Quotes

When you begin to think about the past, you realize how much of it is lost to us.

The memory fades, and I’m left hanging on to the ghosts of his words.

Imperceptibly, more time passes when I'm not remembering our every moment together, not recreating our every conversation, re-imagining our love-making. It is immeasurably sad.

We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last we destroy them out discretion, and so disappears the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and for others.

Memories are hunting horns whose sound dies on the wind.

Memories, so sweet and bitter.. they had both nourished and devoured him for so many years. Until a time came when they began to fade, turning faint and blurred, only an ache to be quickly pushed away because it went to your heart. For what was the use of remembering all you had lost?

It's funny, I listen to friends who talk about back when they were 14, eight, 16, whatever, as if it was yesterday. Me, I've no idea what I did. It's all a blur, I'm afraid.

It's been 25 years now, and truthfully, time sometimes blurs the memory.

My guess is that he remembers some of me, some of us together, and the rest rolled off him like topsoil in a flash flood.

Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.

As for the square at Meknes, where I used to go every day, it's even simpler: I do not see it at all anymore. All that remains is the vague feeling that it was charming, and these five words that are indivisibly bound together: a charming square at Meknes. ... I don't see anything any more: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.

The years leech at a man's memories, even those he has vowed never to forget.

We couldn't understand because we were too far... and could not remember because we were traveling in the night of first ages, those ages that had gone, leaving hardly a sign... and no memories.

And, as always happens, and happens far too soon, the strange and wonderful becomes a memory and a memory becomes a dream. Tomorrow it's gone.

Memory can glean, but can never renew. It brings us joys faint as is the perfume of the flowers, faded and dried, of the summer that is gone.

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.

it seemed a lifetime ago i'd lain in bed with Lena and felt her breath tickling my chin and held her while she slept, felt her heart beating through her skin to mine. it was a lifetime ago. everything was different.

Ah, words are poor receipts for what time hath stole away.

What if I’ve forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?...the thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow.

I thought I would spend the rest of my life searching for little reminders of you.

Memory inevitably romanticizes, pressing reality to recede like pain.

That's the trouble with living things. Don't last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.

Visiting old haunts is hard on memory. Things shrink, change, and disappear.