#memo

So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears. ↗

— Marcel Proust

#beauty

The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.” Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; “tout aboutit en un livre,” everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#borges #gods #homer #mallarmé #memory

This I have known, and these have come again With echoing happiness in heart and brain; Time standing still, surrendering to me Beauty that otherwise would cease to be. ↗

— William Kean Seymour

#memory #remembrance #time #beauty

My own dim life should teach me this, That life shall live for evermore, Else earth is darkness at the core, And dust and ashes all that is; This round of green, this orb of flame, Fantastic beauty such as lurks In some wild Poet, when he works Without a conscience or an aim. What then were God to such as I? 'Twere hardly worth my while to choose Of things all mortal, or to use A tattle patience ere I die; 'Twere best at once to sink to peace, Like birds the charming serpent draws, To drop head-foremost in the jaws Of vacant darkness and to cease. ↗

— Alfred Tennyson

#beauty

Drawing things makes them seem more real and makes me feel more alive. It also makes me pin down and remember things - landscapes, season, weather, occasions, incidents, people - that would otherwise have melted from my memory. ↗

— David Gentleman

#memory #beauty

I'm in the back of a limousine with Charlie Chaplin and it’s 1928. Charlie is beautiful; his body language seems to skip, and reel and rhyme, heartbreaking and witty at the same time. It seems to promise a better world. ↗

— Geoff Ryman

#body-language #charlie-chaplin #history #memory #beauty

(Quoting Goethe:) "We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and for others. ↗

— James Howe

#letters #memory #beauty

At my age a man discovers regret, Senhor Mouse. I pursued blood instead of beauty. My memories are all of killing. I've forgotten the rest. Sometimes I cannot sleep. ↗

— John Speed

#age

Forever does not make loss forgettable, only bearable, Brother Zachariah to Clary Fray ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#death

So, really," continued Jacob as if this were perfectly normal to expound on art in these circumstances, "when you think about it, the artists who make people stop and think, who push the form, who make you uncomfortable, who are laughable, well, they're the ones who get remembered." Idly, Jacob dug a hole in the snow with his shovel and then another one next to it. "So why wouldn't you want to join the ranks of the ridiculed? ↗

— Justina Chen

#artists #laughable #memorable-works #pushing-the-limits #ridicule