Maya Angelou Quotes

When I held in my hands the remains of Gunther, I had a strong feeling, like a phantom pain of an amputee.

Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past.

The bottom line is I'm writing to save the dead. I'm writing to save the people I have lost, some of whose bodies are still walking around.

Sorrow is properly that state of the mind in which our desires are fixed upon the past without looking forward to the future.

I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.

And, hungry for the old, familiar ways, I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.

Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren't tears. She wasn't crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.

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.

The shadow-past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name.

And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill; But O for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still!

the other guineahen died of a broken heart and we came to New York. I used to sit at a table,drawing wings with a pencil that kept breaking and i kept remembering how your mind looked when it slept for several years,to wake up asking why. So then you turned into a photograph of somebody who’s trying not to laugh at somebody who’s trying not to cry

Of all our sorrows, memory is the worst.

I remember the day my mother died, and it's still hard to talk about it. I just blocked it out.

In the midst of the sense of tragedy or loss, sometimes laughter is not only healing, it's a way of experiencing the person that you've lost again.

The past has an undeniable grip on everyone, except, perhaps, amnesiacs.

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

I've never really had anybody close to me die. I think the song is about a feeling that I have that, it still applies. It's a feeling of longing, once again.

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.

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

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 used to cry myself to sleep every night. I missed singing so much. And performing. Man, I missed it so much.

I have a, you know, a John Ritter-shaped hole in my heart. Nobody can replace that.

I can't even say what my greatest fear is because I, I can't even imagine. Being without my family... I can't even say it because it makes me cry.