Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes

Even now, she wished she could write a note, push it across the table, and go away to her room. But she was no longer a Second Assistant Librarian of the Great Library of the Clayr. Those days were gone, vanished with everything else that had defined her previous existence and identity.

Nostalgia is not what it used to be.

You can't really go back to where you came from. I don't think any of us can.

The moon I see now is the same moon I saw before. Except that before, when I looked at it, it was in anticipation of what it would be like when I got there. That's behind me now.

What I want back is what I was.

My brother and I have a profound nostalgia for our youth, and I think people need to come to terms with things leaving and being gone.

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 could not imagine that the future I was walking toward could compare in any way to the past that I was leaving behind.

Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast

That was such a wonderful time, even in its strangeness and sadness-and life isn't the same now. It's wonderful, but it isn't the same.

And here I am, instead of there. I'm sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won't be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?

Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't ever quite repeat anything, and I've been so yours, here--

I thoroughly object to getting old. If you could let me be 16 again, I'd give you everything I've got and everything I'll ever have.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

There is something in the pang of change More than the heart can bear, Unhappiness remembering happiness.

It's sad when someone you know becomes someone you knew.

If there's one thing I discovered since I came back from hiatus, it's that you can't go backwards.

The notion of time bothers me. You look at thirty-year-old photographs and realize how the time has passed.

The things hardest to bear are sweetest to remember.

There are times when you want to go where you used to go and you can't go there.

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

Nothing is so dear as what you're about to leave.

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

When you don't do something anymore, all of a sudden everyone treasures it.