Christopher Paolini Quotes

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

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.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

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

What's gone will never come back, but it exists when you think of it.

Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.

All those years and their moments— Crackling bacon, slamming car doors, Poems tried out on friends, Will be one more archive, One more shaky text.

The entire world is a collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her.

Night is the time to weep,To wet with unseen tearsThose graves of memory where sleepThe joys of other years.

Friends depart, and memory takes them To her caverns, pure and deep.

We're captive on the carousel of time, we can't return we can only look behind.

The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.

Because it is senior year I have begun to see things as potential absences. The things I love will become the things I'll miss.

Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment. All that remains of my mother is what I remember and what I have written for and about her. Eventually that is all that will remain of [my husband] and me. Writing sometimes feels frivolous and sometimes sacred, but memory is one of my strongest muses. I serve her with my words. So long as people read, those we love survive however evanescently. As do we writers, saying with our life's work, Remember. Remember us. Remember me.

Since I met him ten years ago there hasn't been a day that I didn't think of George Burns. And I didn't think of him again today.

After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

You have to remember that goodbyes are temporary because no one ever really leaves and nothing lasts forever. People are always with us, because they are in our hearts and in our memory. The only thing we can depend on is change... Life is just a series of moments -- a string of pearls that make up the necklace of your life and so every once in a while, to complete the circle, you need to end a chapter.

You and I are like the first two people on earth who at the beginning of the world had nothing to cover themselves with - at the end of it, you and I are just as stripped and homeless. And you and I are the last remembrance of all that immeasurable greatness which has been created in all the thousands of years between their time and ours, and it is in memory of all that vanished splendour that we live and love and weep and cling to one another.

The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.

She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love-- nothing, now, but bones.

In my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.

There is nothing steadfast in life but our memories. We are sure of keeping intact only that which we have lost.

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?