“Ghosts are those memories that are too strong to be forgotten for good, echoing across the years and refusing to be obliterated by time.”
“Since childhood, I was afflicted with a sick hypersensitivity, and my imagination quickly turned everything into a memory, too quickly: sometimes one day was enough, or an interval of a few hours, or a routine change of place, for an everyday event with a lyrical value that I did not sense at the time, to become suddenly adorned with a radiant echo, the echo ordinarily reserved only for those memories which have been standing for many years in the powerful fixative of lyrical oblivion.”
“Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away to be forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This is but one of several; for Time eats up the works of man.”
“Look back, hold a torch to light the recesses of the dark. Listen to the footsteps that echo behind, when you walk alone.All the time the ghosts flit past and through us, hiding in the future. We look in the mirror and see the shades of other faces looking back through the years; we see the shape of memory, standing solid in an empty doorway. By blood and by choice, we make our ghosts; we haunt ourselves.Each ghost comes unbidden from the misty grounds of dream and silence.Our rational minds say, "No, it isn't."But another part, an older part, echoes always softly in the dark, "Yes, but it could be.”
“Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory. ”
“A defeated argument that refuses to be obliterated can remain very alive.”