Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

We tried not to age, but time had its rage.

The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.

Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.

Once time is lit, it will burn whether or not you're breathing it in. Even after smoke becomes air, there is the memory of smoke. I am seeing as if by the light of a match, a glimpse of my life and having it feel right.

Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

All things are taken from us, and become Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come Again in this identical guise.

In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.

Time stays, we go.

Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.

But where are the snows of yester year?

Time is not kind to everything.

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

Never has the future become so rapidly the past.

It's pretty scary to know how quickly time flies.

You can't halt time.

Nothing is forever, but history is forever.

Time, memory, loss and love are my main artistic concerns, but time, among all of them, becomes the determinant.

It is all falling indelibly into the past.

That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.

Reflect often upon the rapidity with which all existing things, or things coming into existence, sweep past us and are carried away.

So of course time is necessary. But nevertheless damn painful, for it transforms all the pieces of your life - joy and sorrow, youth and age, love and hate, terror and bliss - from fire into smoke rising up the air and dissipating on a breeze.

I was looking at the photographs and I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories.