Remembrance Quotes

Do not shed tears when I have gone but smile instead because I have lived.

David Harkins, Remember Me, 1982

You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.

Jane Austen

A feeling of sadness and longing that is not akin to pain, and resembles sorrow only as the mist resembles the rain.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward.

Margaret Fairless Barber

If I should die, think only this of me:That there's some corner of a foreign fieldThat is for ever England. There shall beIn that rich earth a richer dust concealed;A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,A body of England's, breathing English air,Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.And think, this heart, all evil shed away,A pulse in the eternal mind, no lessGives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Rupert Brooke, The Soldier

Eulogies are like babies. They're more pleasurable to create than to deliver.

Bob Blazich

It takes a huge effort to free yourself from memory

Paulo Coelho

Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother's cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.

John Steinbeck

O rose, who dares to name thee?No longer roseate now, nor soft, nor sweet,But pale, and hard, and dry, as stubblewheat,--Kept seven years in a drawer, thy titles shame thee.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, A De

I wept as I remembered how often you and I had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

Callimachus

That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot come again.

A.E. Housman

After musing for some minutes, the old gentleman walked, with the same meditative face, into a back anteroom opening from the yard; and there, retiring into a corner, called up before his mind's eye a vast amphitheatre of faces over which a dusky curtain had hung for many years.

Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind. We wallow in nostalgia but manage to get it all wrong. True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories... but American-style nostalgia is about as ephemeral as copyrighted d?j? vu.

Florence King

may my heart always be open to little birds who are the secrets of livingwhatever they sing is better than to knowand if men should not hear them men are oldmay my mind stroll about hungryand fearless and thirsty and suppleand even if it

e. e. (Edward Estlin) cummings

Our dead brothers still live for us and bid us think of life, not death--of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and glory of Spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil, our trumpets, sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.

Oliver Wendell Holmes