Quotes About Irretrievable

All reification is a forgetting'—making available what has passed at once makes it irretrievable. Therein lies the desperate utopia of all musical reproduction: to retrieve the irretrievable through availability. All music-making is a recherche du temps perdu.

Lost time is never found again.

This is how memory works: not as a transcription but as an attempt—as an essay is an attempt . . . to locate meaning between the irretrievable then and the equally unfathomable now.

Excuse my dress. I was half an hour late this morning. When you lose half an hour in this house, you never can pick it up again, try how you may. -Reverend Finch's wife

Remember that wasted minute at the start of the day? Hard luck but you'll never find it again.

What is it, I wonder, that they hope to Correct? I am what I am, irredeemably, irretrievably, implacably — as are most of my fellow desperadoes here in Correctional Facility. We are monsters.

Nothing in the world can be sustained, neither bugles nor hope nor woe nor desire nor common well-being nor horns, and even redemption, that suspect covenant, can be revised by the bitter and loveless Christ to whom nothing, not even life, is irretrievable.

irretrievably broken and wholly unbreakable

It is not often given to human beings to be able to treat a fragment of time that can never return again with the intense and ritualistic concentration appropriate to a moment irretrievably slipping away into an everlasting impossibility of repetition.

The broad daylight of habitual memory gradually fades our images of the past, wears them away until nothing is left of them and the past becomes irrecoverable.