Quotes About Reflection

O! call back yesterday, bid time return.

Memories leave a light in the eyes, just as plain as scars.

Patricia embraces me on the station platform. 'The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,' she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. 'Nonsense, Patricia,' I tell her as I climb on board my train. 'The past's what you take with you.

but one cannot look backward, only forward. What has passed has passed forever.

One's own life seemed puny against the background of so much history.

although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)

She had had affairs over the years ... but she had never been pregnant, never been a mother or a wife and it was only when she realized that it was too late, that it could never be, that she understood what it was that she had lost. Pamela's life would go on after she was dead, her descendants spreading through the world like the waters of a delta, but when Ursula died she would simply end. A stream that ran dry.

He was a baby once, she thought. New and perfect, cradled in his mother's arms. The mysterious Sylvie. Now he was a feathery husk, ready to blow away. His eyes were half open, milky, like an old dog, and his mouth had grown beaky with the extremity of age, opening and closing, a fish out of water. Bertie could feel a continual tremor running through him, an electrical current, the faint buzz of life. Or death, perhaps. Energy was gathering around him, the air was static with it.

The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.

Get down,' Bunty says grimly. 'Mummy's thinking.' (Although what Mummy's actually doing is wondering what it would be like if her entire family was wiped out and she could start again.)

She had been here before. She had never been here before. There was always something just out of sight, just around a corner, something she could never chase down—something that was chasing her down.

Afterwards—because it turned out that there was to be an afterwards for Teddy—he resolved that he would try always to be kind. It was the best he could do. It was all that he could do. And it might be love, after all.

you walk into a room and your life ends but you keep on living.

Sweet sixteen, Hugh said, kissing her affectionately. Happy birthday, little bear. Your future's all ahead of you. Ursula still harbored the feeling that some of her future was also behind her but she had learned not to voice such things.

Running wasn't pointless, of course. Sometimes you did it to try to outrun your thoughts, sometimes you did it to chase them and bring them down. Sometimes you did it so that you didn't think at all.

The eat part was easy. The praying and loving were harder.

Juliet felt slighted yet relieved. It was curious how you could hold two quite opposing feelings at the same time, an unsettling emotional discord. She felt an odd pang at the sight of him. She had been fond of him. She had been his girl. Reader, I didn't marry him, she thought.

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more"… Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.

it had probably been a long enough life. Yet suddenly it all seemed like an illusion, a dream that had happened to someone else. What an odd thing existence was.

Did God get out of bed one morning and draw back the curtains (Reggie's imaginary God led a very domesticated life) and think, 'A drowning in a hotel swimming pool, I fancy. We haven't had that one in a while.

Home', it had struck her on the torturous drive back to London, wasn't Egerton Gardens, wasn't even Fox Corner. Home was an idea, and like Arcadia it was lost in the past.

Doing nothing was much more productive than people thought; Jackson often had his most profound insights when he appeared to be entirely idle. He didn't get bored, he just went into a nothing kind of place.

On the outside of the bedroom door there was a plaque that said Valerie . On the way up, Jackson noticed that other bedrooms also had names - Eleanor, Lucy, Anna, Charlotte .Jackson wondered how you decided on a name for a room. Or a doll. Or a child, for that matter. The naming of dogs seemed even more perplexing.

Later, when she understood that it was the last time they would all be together, she wished she had paid more attention.