George MacDonald Quotes

For a second, I feel a sense of overwhelming grief: for how things change, for the fact that we can never go back. I'm not certain of anything anymore. I don't know what will happen--

Seeing him again after so long awakened something inside me. I was surprised to find myself feeling sad rather than joyful, as I would have imagined.

Inside of us, there's a continual autumn. Our leaves fall and are blown out over the water.

There is no harbor of peace from the changing waves of joy and despair.

The only good thing about the good old days is they're gone.

The art of longing's over, and it's never coming back.

Of one thing alone I am very sure: it is a law of our nature that the memory of longing should survive the more fugitive memory of fulfillment.

While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.

Why live life from dream to dream, and dread the day when dreaming ends.

Listen- all that she was then, all that she is now, those gestures, everything I remember but won't or can't articulate anymore, the perfect words that are somehow made imperfect when used to describe her and all that should remain unsaid about her- it is all unsupported by reason. I know that. But that enigmatic calm that attaches itself to people in the presence of reason- it's something from which I haven't been able to take comfort, not reliably, not since her.

They know these mornings well and love them desperately because they cannot last - these people who know that nothing lasts.

I could hear the knock and whistle of the water pipes, the purr of the calico cat. And at that moment a happiness filled me that was pure and perfect and yet it was bled with despair - as if I had been handed a cup of ambrosial nectar to drink from and knew that once I finished drinking, the cup would be withdrawn forever, and nothing to come would ever taste as good.

All our pride is but a jest. None are worst and none are best. Grief and hope and joy and fear Play their pageant everywhere.

This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.

She wanted none of those days to end, and it was always with disappointment that she watched the darkness stride forward.

It's the same thing that happens when I turn off a really good movie - one that I've lost myself to - which is that I'll be thrown back to my own reality and something hollow will settle in my chest. Sometimes, I'll watch a movie all over again just to recapture that feeling of being inside something real. Which, I know, doesn't make any sense.

If we can remember the feeling of love we once had, we can die without ever going away.

as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.

Alas, why does my mind have to walk through the dust of the past every day?

I can't remember all the times I've tried to tell myself to hold on to these moments as they pass

That old feeling is still in my leaking heart.

We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling.

But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me.