Mignon McLaughlin Quotes

From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

Wish I could spin my world into reverse just to have you back again

It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back.

...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.

I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.

There are a hundred places where I fear To go, --so with his memory they brim! And entering with relief some quiet place Where never fell his foot or shone his face I say, 'There is no memory of him here!' And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

Perhaps - I want the old days back again and they'll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears.

I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy's sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost.

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

Some of these days, Oh, you'll miss me honey

Who that has plodded on to middle age would take back upon his shoulders ten of the vanished years, with their mingled pleasures and pains? Who would return to the youth he is forever pretending to regret?

The whole world can't lick us but we can lick ourselves by longing too hard for things we haven't got any more - and by remembering too much.

I feel some unwillingness to quit the remembrance of the past. With all the hope of the new I feel that we are leaving the old.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.

Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case," in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.

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

I Sing what was lost and dread what was won, / I walk in a battle fought over again.

What golden hour of life, what glittering moment will ever equal the pain its loss can cause?

Everything I loved became everything I've lost.

I think you can only be nostalgic for something you've lost.