Diane Ackerman Quotes

Music is...a form of remembering, a return to the seasons of the heart long gone.

I've always loved romantic songs.

Love, however, is very materially assisted by a warm and active imagination: which has a long memory, and will thrive, for a considerable time, on very slight and sparing food.

Because who can describe that look that triggers the memory of loved ones? Who can anticipate the frown, the smile, or the misplaced lock of hair that sends a swift, undeniable signal from the past? Who can ever estimate the power of association, which is always strongest in moments of love and in memories of death?

Curious, how one remembered Christmas. Perhaps because other days might appeal to the head, but this one appealed to the heart.

For better or for worse, music is the language of memory. It is also the language of love.

Nowadays he doesn't think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night.

Time has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved. You find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree.

I love people, but I love the thought and memory of them just as much.

Back on its golden hinges The gate of Memory swings, And my heart goes into the garden And walks with the olden things.

You can't kill it with goodbye; It always finds a place to hide inside your heart for your whole life. Love is never-ending.

I'm just corny enough to like to have a story hit me over the heart.

What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?

Any place you love is the world to you”, explained the pensive Catherine Wheel, who had been attached to an old deal box in early life, and prided herself on her broken heart; “but love is not fashionable any more, the poets have killed it. They wrote so much about that nobody believed them, and I am not surprised. True love suffers, and is silent. I remember myself once- But it is no matter now. Romance is a thing of the past.

What an enormous magnifier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory and in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it

The past is perpetual youth to the heart.

You will soon discover that in matters of the heart, memories are much kinder than reality

Though one cannot always Remember exactly why one has been happy, There is no forgetting that one was.

Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart.

This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished, for you, my love, my loss, my lesion, a rosary of words to count out time's illusions, all the minutes, hours, days the calendar compounds as if the past existed somewhere like an inheritance still waiting to be claimed.

Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.

We revisit those places where we experienced love, as pilgrims return to holy places, to be reminded, restored, and reaffirmed by them.