Past Sorrows Quotes

An emotion that lives with me is a sense of 'what might have been' had injuries not robbed me of my most lethal weapon - speed.

The long historian of my country's woes.

He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.

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.

It is folly to shiver over last year's snow.

Old men are prone to invest the futures of young men with their own past sorrows.

Night is the time to weep,To wet with unseen tearsThose graves of memory where sleepThe joys of other years.

An hour will come, with pleasure to relate Your sorrows past, as benefits of Fate.

O what a blessed day that will be when I shall . . . stand on the shore and look back on the raging seas I have safely passed; when I shall review my pains and sorrows, my fears and tears, and possess the glory which was the end of all!

Regret is a short, evocative and achingly beautiful word: an elegy to lost possibilities even in its brief annunciation.