Richard Thompson Quotes

Everyone I have lost in the closing of a door the click of the lock is not forgotten, they do not die but remain within the soft edges of the earth, the ash of house fires and cancer in sin and forgiveness huddled under old blankets dreaming their way into my hands, my heart closing tight like fists. - "Indian Boy Love Song #1

Lost love is still love. It takes a different form, that's all. You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it.

Jennifer had never liked the pain of remembering what had happened, but for Theo it was the pain that kept Laura alive in his memory. He was afraid that if it ever began to heal she would disappear.

I think of John every day. I do try to block it, but December 8th is not the only day I think of him.

I always think of my father when I sing arias about loss and love and longing. It gave me that definite deep sorrow that one can only get from life experience, you know?

There’s something beautiful and very circular about passing by something that was important to the person you loved, or touching something that once meant something to him — that brings me some peace.

Memory is the only friend of grief.

MUSIC I heard with you was more than music, And bread I broke with you was more than bread. Now that I am without you, all is desolate, All that was once so beautiful is dead. Your hands once touched this table and this silver,And I have seen your fingers hold this glass. These things do not remember you, beloved: And yet your touch upon them will not pass. For it was in my heart you moved among them,And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes.And in my heart they will remember always: They knew you once, O beautiful and wise!

When someone is in your heart, they're never truly gone. They can come back to you, even at unlikely times.

Night is the time to weep,To wet with unseen tearsThose graves of memory where sleepThe joys of other years.

Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.

I wondered if there would ever be a day when I didn't think about Alaska, wondered whether I should hope for a time when she would be a distant memory - recalled only on the anniversary of her death, or maybe a couple of weeks after, remembering only after having forgotten.

With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,-- What I keep of you, or you rob from me.

By an image we hold on to our lost treasures, but it is the wrenching loss that forms the image, composes, binds the bouquet.

... I have no letter from the dead, yet daily love them more.

The cold, the changed, perchance the dead, anew, The mourn'd, the loved, the lost,-too many, yet how few!

She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love-- nothing, now, but bones.

So sad! This is the saddest part when you lose someone you love- that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, Is this the same person I lost?

This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished, for you, my love, my loss, my lesion, a rosary of words to count out time's illusions, all the minutes, hours, days the calendar compounds as if the past existed somewhere like an inheritance still waiting to be claimed.

I answer the heroic question, 'Death, where is thy sting?' with 'It is in my heart and mind and memories.

Cold inthe earthand the deepsnow piled abovethee, Far, far, removed, cold in the dreary grave! Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee, Severed at last byTime's all-serving wave?

Of all our sorrows, memory is the worst.

In 1957's 'There's No You,' Sinatra is suspended at the intersection of a loss he can't face and a memory he can't relinquish.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Dad, wherever you are, you are gone but you will never be forgotten.