Susan Beth Pfeffer Quotes

We possess nothing certainly except the past

You never know how much time you have with someone.

The past is more than a memory.

The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen.

Remember that any meal can be your last. You chose to travel with us, so tonight you will eat fish. Tomorrow, you may die.

He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.

There were things in my past which I have not liked. But all the things of which I was proud will remain.

It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As a person deprived of memory becomes disorientated and lost, not knowing where they have been or where they are going , so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future.

In the end, the end of a life only matters to friends, family, and other folks you used to know. For everyone else, it's just another end.

At some point, your memories, your stories, your adventures, will be the only things you'll have left.

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

I wake each day and try to see what I might do that is of some value and joy. It's a strange life. I don't know how long it'll go on. I don't look past tomorrow. Anything beyond tomorrow seems like hearsay. Or fairy tales.

I don't expect to live forever, nor do I repine over that, but I am weak enough to want to be remembered forever. - Yet how few of those who have lived, even of those who have accomplished far more than I have, linger on in world memory for even a single century after death

The past is a bucket of ashes

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.

I never lie down at night without reflecting that, young as I am, I may not live to see another day.

We had our thing. It is a really good memory but now we're older. Things change.

I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago, and of people who will see a world that I shall never know.

You may still be here tomorrow...but your dreams may not.

He poured the tumbler full. Drink up, he said. The world goes on. We have dancing nightly and this night is no exception. The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

As ephemeral as our footprints were in the sand along the river, so also were those moments of childhood caught in the photographs. And so will be our family itself, our marriage, the children who enriched it and the love that has carried us through so much. All this will be gone. What we hope will remain are these pictures, telling our brief story.

I like to write about the way things used to be and paint pictures of my memories with beautiful words and melodies.

Ye poor posterity, think not that ye are the first. Other fools before ye have seen the sun rise and set, and the moon change her shape and her hour. As they were so ye are; and yet not so great; for the pyramids my people built stand to this day; whilst the dustheaps on which ye slave, and which ye call empires, scatter in the wind even as ye pile your dead sons' bodies on them to make yet more dust.

To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.