Ellen Glasgow Quotes

Their memory's like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can't remember Tell the things you can't forget that History puts a saint in every dream.

The great disadvantage of getting older is to be obliged to relive the salient economic events of one's youth, with nothing learned and nothing forgotten.

We can revere our past, but we cannot re-capture it.

History some truths contains, which well may serve for lessons.

Nothing can last forever. There isn't any memory, no matter how intense, that doesn't fade out at last.

Gone, glimmering through the dream of things that were.

You live and learn. Then you die and forget it all.

History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.

He who has had, has been, but he who hasn't been, has been had.

The past was a dream wasn't it? And who ever remembers dreams?

We only have the past that we have. Not all of our deeds were incorrect.

But memory is an autumn leaf that murmurs a while in the wind and then is heard no more.

What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused?--Experience, old people's experience.

A recorded past is no more than a bygone present composed of the footprints made by human beings actually going somewhere but not knowing (in any extended sense), and certainly not revealing to us, how, they came to be afoot on these particular journeys.

Life is about experience... You can't hold on to everything

You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it).

Use your past as one of your mentors.

Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to continue always a child.

Hindsight's a wonderful thing. If we all had it there would be no history to write about.

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.

People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.

Hence life, as through a cloud, for me I see Vanish, and to the past's dark shade 'tis chas'd; As a grand image love remains to me-- Sole remnant of a dream, by morn effac'd.

Memory is a tenuous thing, like a rainbow's end or a camera with a failing lens.

History, which undertakes to record the transactions of the past, for the instruction of future ages, would ill deserve that honourable office if she condescended to plead the cause of tyrants, or to justify the maxims of persecution.

I realized people would soon forget me once I was dead. I couldn't even say that this was hard to stomach; really, there's no idea to which one doesn't get acclimatized in time.