Quotes About Memories

Nostalgia lurks, ready to ooze from ambush.

trying not to get emotional but still hanging on the rearview mirror's single tale of recedings and vanishing points as we hang on looks our lovers give.

SHE CAME ALONG THE ALLEY AND UP THE BACK STEPS THE WAY she always used to. Doc hadn't seen her for over a year. Nobody had. Back then it was always sandals, bottom half of a flower-print bikini, faded Country Joe & the Fish T-shirt. Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he remembered

Love never goes away Never completely dies Always some souvenir Takes us by sad surprise You went away from me, One rose was left behind -- Pressed in my Book of Hours That is the rose I find Though it's another year Though it's another me, Under the rose is a a drying tear, Under my linden tree Love never goes away, Not if it's really true It can return, by night, by day Tender and green and new As the leaves from a linden tree, love, that I left with you

Take what I've got. You've been good. Phil, at that moment in that place that smelled of years felt in his throat what he'd felt once before and dear God knows never expected nor wanted to feel again, for the loss of it breaks your heart.

Short stories can be like photographs, catching people at some moment in their lives and trapping the memory for ever . There they are, smiling or frowning, looking sad, happy, serious, surprised ... And behind those smiles and those frowns lie all the experience of life, the fears and delights, the hopes and the dreams

Even the photographs were on the mantelpiece and the medicine bottles on the shelf above the wash-stand. Her clothes lay across a chair—her outdoor things, a purple cape and a round hat with a plume in it. Looking at them she wished that she was going away from this house, too. And she saw herself driving away from them all in a little buggy, driving away from everybody and not even waving.

When Harry came I had his letters all ready, and the ring and a ducky little brooch he'd given me—a silver bird it was, with a chain in its beak, and on the end of the chain a heart with a dagger.

When my husband died, people kept telling me not to cry. People kept trying to help me to forget. But I didn't want to forget... So I realize, that if it's hard for me, how much harder it must be for you.

The Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller reports that many adults are unable to remember their childhoods. According to Miller, these memories are repressed at a time when it is necessary for the child's emotional survival to forget. To experience the pain of wounds inflicted by parents on whom the child is totally dependent is, in the child's undeveloped mind, tantamount to death. And so the child learns not to feel—and eventually, not to remember—these hurts.

Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

air, and even the rain could not wash the

Dad's Buick—what a great car it had been all these years—

Conner hadn't liked leaving the gravesite with his father still not buried. But he'd learned from his grandmother's funeral that you have to go. It's expected. Nobody hangs around the cemetary. Grief—a little or a lot—is tucked into your pocket and carried away.

What I wouldn't give to share one more morning with my dad.

The tortured sounds followed Niall as he stumbled back to the hearth. Muted cries, choking sobs, mingled with the snapping, crackling clamor of the hungry fire. Time passed with lumbering slowness as Niall stared into the agitated flames, hearing it all from some place far away, even as the night's horror charred its memory into his soul. Never had he hurt so, not from any wound in battle, not from . . . He paused. The sounds

Those fields of childhood, tall Meadow-grass and flowers small, The elm whose dusky leaves Patterned the sky with dreams innumerable And labyrinthine vein and vine And wandering tendrils green, Have grown a seed so small A single thought contains them all

It's amazing how lonely a place where you were once happy can become.

The house filled rapidly; cheerful talk overflowed the rooms and children were bobbing in and out everywhere with their shining new toys, until finally, at a very late hour, we all sat down to the Christmas dinner, before the huge, crisp and crackling brown body of the Christmas goose. Everything but the holiday was forgotten. That was the last night I remember, in the years in which I was to remain in Germany, over which no shadow fell.

It was painful to remember him, but the thought of forgetting him was even worse.

She pined for Rick and the brief but happy life they had once shared, before his drinking had ruined everything.

We used to run all the time as boys, remember?" Archer's grin grew. "I remember Tryst trying to keep up. Poor little bastard.

It's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years. - Abraham Lincoln

Endless gratitude to my posse of pals who fielded countless calls and texts, and took so many walks down memory lane with me, with plenty of liquor nearby: Bob Peterson, Matt Lombardi, Lori Beecher, Lauren Osborn, Nicolla Hewitt, Brian Goldsmith, and Tony Maciulis. (If these walls could talk—oh wait, they just did.