But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.
Memory is not wisdom; idiots can by rote repeat volumes. Yet what is wisdom without memory?
It's a poor sort of memory that only works backward.
Adults interfere with a natural biologic development of the child's motor, visual, mental, and artistic abilities when they try to influence the child's work in the early years. The adult's brain has accumulated much more visual and artistic memory than the child's, so there can be no true meeting of adult and child mind unless the adult knows how the child's mind functions in art.
See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it. And the very act of living is a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded.
I heard a definition once: Happiness is health and a short memory! I wish I'd invented it, because it is very true.
Purpose is but the slave to memory, of violent birth, but poor validity.
Once time is lit, it will burn whether or not you're breathing it in. Even after smoke becomes air, there is the memory of smoke. I am seeing as if by the light of a match, a glimpse of my life and having it feel right.
Was he a good kisser, Ms. Lane?†Barrons asked, watching me carefully. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand at the memory. “It was like being owned.†Some women like that.†Not me.†Perhaps it depends on the man doing the owning.†I doubt it. I couldn’t breathe with him kissing me.†One day you may kiss a man you can’t breathe without, and find breath is of little consequence.†Right, and one day my prince might come.†I doubt he’ll be a prince, Ms. Lane. Men rarely are.
You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.