Quotes About Memories

Elizabeth had tried to hate him in that first year when the pain had been intense enough to drive her almost out of her mind. But even then she had not been able to. The best she could do eventually was to dull all feeling, so that a mere empty ache would gnaw at her when her mind strayed to that episode in her life. She had trained herself to think of him, if at all, as he was at the beginning of their relationship.

Let us enjoy it, he said, his eyes looking directly into hers. We are both in need of some good memories, I believe.

She remembered Robert as he had looked when the vicar had pronounced them married. The sun itself had seemed to be behind his smile as he had turned to her and kissed her lightly on the lips. It had seemed that they had conquered fate, that they were now safe forever.

Some kind angel must have granted me these few encounters with you in the past weeks, he said. I will live on the memories.

I still miss him. There is a loneliness and an emptiness where he was.

And they had had two days together, forty-eight hours into which to cram a lifetime of happiness. No longer.

Better the dull pain of bitter memories, he was half inclined to think, than the raw pain of this new parting that was upon him. And there seemed to be nothing he could do to avert it.

Elizabeth clung now to the seat of the curricle as she looked back on that night over the achingly lonely years between. Hetherington just could not be the same man. They could not possibly have grown so far apart after having shared that .

He would see her for perhaps five minutes the next morning, when he would be tongue-tied with all there was to say. And then the journey back to London. And Cassandra. And his wedding. And the rest of his life. And never Allie again. Never again.

I thought I had forgotten . . . But maybe I just pushed it deep and denied it and let it fester.

The next few days were all she could ever have of him.

She had loved him mindlessly, passionately, for the following five years, until he had told her that he was going away and never coming back. And even beyond that she had loved him, painfully and against her will, until she had finally forced herself to forget. Or to tell herself that she had forgotten.

He had vaulted into the saddle and ridden down the driveway away from the sea and the cliffs, and away from her, without a backward glance. She had watched him, an ache in her heart, until a line of trees finally hid him from view.

But there is a difference between thinking of an absent friend and thinking of someone who used to be a friend and never will be again.

Elizabeth's fingers itched to slap him. She could recall now the stinging satisfaction she had had from doing so on a previous occasion.

The memory of his treachery would harden her against her own heart.

And so this was the end. The end of a friendship that had brightened his life through most of his adulthood. Not the end of his love. Now that he was conscious of it again, that would live on, perhaps for the rest of his life.

He should have stayed away. The memories were going to be very sweet, it was true. They were also going to be unbearable.

But it was an ordeal worse than any she had yet experienced in the days since she heard he was coming home. To see him and to hear him was bad enough. To touch him was unendurable—that slim yet surprisingly strong hand that had so often held hers in the past, so often touched and caressed her.

Christina. There was nothing else to say. Just her name and all the pain of its utterance.

And after he was gone, there would be memories to live on. But she would not think of that yet.

Whatever we recall, if we respond to it with love, we can transform even those memories we think of as injustices. With love we go into forgiveness. We forgive what happened and we forgive ourselves. The result is that our agreement changes and we recover a little more of the totality of ourselves.

Home, he said softly. If there is a more beautiful word in any language, I do not know it.

IF YOU WANT A STORYBOOK ENDING, stop—now—and remember them in that tender moment. Be content to know that they embarked on a series of adventures throughout the West and that they stayed together through thick and thin for forty-five years. But know this as well: If their story ended here, no one would remember them at all. Where a tale begins and where it ends matters. Who tells the story, and why . . . That makes all the difference.