Gustave Flaubert Quotes

The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.

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

On the rare occasions when I spend a night in Oxford, the keeping of the hours by the clock towers in New College, and Merton, and the great booming of Tom tolling 101 times at 9 pm at Christ Church are inextricably interwoven with memories and regrets and lost joys. The sound almost sends me mad, so intense are the feelings it evokes.

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

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine - you mourn things that actually happened.

The thought of the weekends I used to have now makes me shake.

All the best songs have an element of sadness.

God, I wish you could have been there.

I rarely think about my childhood. It's a slippery thing I can't keep hold of for long - it slithers out of my grasp. And a lot of the time I remember what was missing instead of what was there. I am a chronicler of absence.

I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.

I wondered how long it could last. Maybe someday, years from now.If the pain would decrease to the point where I could bear it.I would be able to look back on those few short months that would always be the best of my life.

It feels like a punch. Tears fill my eyes, and I wonder how I could be upset over losing something I never had.

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

Sam looked at me, yellow eyes catching and holding me. "I miss being me. I miss you. All the time.

Take back the smile and the night, take it all back, I wish I could.

All my life, Following Care along the dusty road, Have I looked back on loveliness and sighed.

How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire

I miss us, too. I always have, and probably always will

homesickness is just a state of mind for me. i'm always missing someone or someplace or something, i'm always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. my life has been one long longing.

All memory can do is scream for touch.

And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again.

It was a life I didn’t want to leave behind.It was a life I didn’t want to forget.