Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

Do you know it was a year a ago today?

When I remember bygone days I think how evening follows morn So many I loved were not yet dead, So many I love were not yet born.

…she remembered watching a summer sunset from this very spot. Not so long ago; just a lifetime.

I came in 11 years ago. I remember it like it was tomorrow

We're captive on the carousel of time, we can't return we can only look behind.

Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through, is now like something from the distant past. We're so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past, like ancient stars that have burned out, are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about every day, too many new things we have to learn. New styles, new information, new technology, new terminology ... But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone. And for me, what happened in the woods that day is one of these.

Time moves only forward, never back. We look forward to a moment and then it arrives and an instant later it is gone. Like something on the surface of a river that we reached for but did not touch in time and it carried on, away. You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind.

I keep saying that backwards is all you can see. You can't see front. My wife says, "Stop, you're always in the past." She sees me sort of daydreaming.

The sands of time cannot be stopped. Years pass whether we will them or not... but we can remember. What has been lost may yet live in memories.

I'm older than I was before when I was young.

One of the permanent possessions of the human heart is the memory of its noble enthusiasms.

We had our thing. It is a really good memory but now we're older. Things change.

Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels. Looking back at the years gone by like so many summer fields.

A memory from my youth comes back to me. You go into the woods on a bike, with a girl. There is the smell of heather, you can hear the wind in the fir trees, you don't dare tell her about your love, but you feel happy, as if you were floating above the ground. Then you look at the clouds beyond the trees and they are fleeting. And you know that within an hour you'll have to go home, that tomorrow will be a working day. You wish you could stop that moment forever, but you can't, it is bound to end. So you take a photo, as if to challenge time.

The thought of our past years in me doth breed perpetual benedictions.

By now, the morning sun was just over the horizon and it came at me like a sidearm pitch between the houses of my old neighborhood. I shielded my eyes. This being early October, there were already piles of leaves pushed against the curb—more leaves than I remembered from my autumns here—andless open space in the sky. I think what you notice most when you haven’t been home in a while is how much the trees have grown around your memories.

I shut the bathroom door and caught sight of my face in the mirror. I had no idea how quickly it was to change, to fade. If I had, I would have stared at my reflection, memorizing it. It was the last time I would look into a real mirror for more than a decade.

I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago, and of people who will see a world that I shall never know.

Our past has gone into history.

Now young faces grow sad and old and hearts of fire grow cold We swore blood brothers against the wind I'm ready to grow young again

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.

Why is it that weeks and months and years go by so quickly, all in a blur, but moments last forever?

I don't know where the time went. I sure have enjoyed it.

As ephemeral as our footprints were in the sand along the river, so also were those moments of childhood caught in the photographs. And so will be our family itself, our marriage, the children who enriched it and the love that has carried us through so much. All this will be gone. What we hope will remain are these pictures, telling our brief story.