Phyllis Theroux Quotes

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.

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

I think about my mother every day. But usually the thoughts are fleeting - she crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye: startling, luminous, lovely... gone.

If in the twilight of memory we should meet once more, we shall speak again together and you shall sing to me a deeper song.

When I die Dublin will be written in my heart.

Memory always obeys the commands of the heart.

When you love something, it never goes away.

I can feel his presence here in every stone he has touched, every person he has lifted up, every street and alley and city that he has changed in the few years of his life, because he is the Republic, he is our light, and I love you, I love you, until the day we meet again I will hold you in my heart and protect you there, grieving what we never had, cherishing what we did. I wish you were here. I love you, always.

Those that he loved so long and sees no more, Loved and still loves,-not dead, but gone before,- He gathers round him.

The act of writing is for me often nothing more than the secret or conscious desire to carve words on a tombstone: to the memory of a town forever vanished, to the memory of a childhood in exile, to the memory of all those I loved and who, before I could tell them I loved them, went away.

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?

From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

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

Make me remember you like you remember me.

When someone is in your heart, they're never truly gone. They can come back to you, even at unlikely times.

The true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.

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

AT first Raoden stayed away from the library, because it reminded him of her. Then he found himself drawn back to it—because it reminded him of her.

Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory; Odours, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken. Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, Are heap'd for the belovèd's bed; And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, Love itself shall slumber on.

I don't know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me.

Promise you won't forget me, ever. Not even when I'm a hundred.