Johnny Ramone Quotes

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

Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!" He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

One may return to the place of his birth, He cannot go back to his youth.

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

How easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

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

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The past is over.

I only felt a cold wind blow while I tried to hang on to the past.

Remembering. Forgetting. I'm not sure which is worse.

I lost track of it thereafter. I wish I had a piece of it. That would have been very, very nice. It was one of those little things they get you on the Bond and then suddenly your face is every which way.

God, I wish you could have been there.

You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way.

It's stupid, I know, but I care. All the things that meant so much when we were young. Under the blankets late at night, listening to long-distance radio. All those things lost now or broken. Can you remember? Can you remember that feeling? Perhaps I ought to go to a doctor.

I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.

You have your wonderful memories," people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

The past is just something that's over.

They say that Hope is happiness But genuine Love must prize the past; And Mem'ry wakes the thoughts that bless: They rose first -- they set the last. And all that mem'ry loves the most Was once our only hope to be: And all that hope adored and lost Hath melted into memory. Alas! It is delusion all-- The future cheats us from afar: Nor can we be what we recall, Nor dare we think on what we are.

It is all falling indelibly into the past.

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.

Don't think about what you've left behind.