“The truth of the matter is, one cannot go back. Some men can: renegade. But Melville couldn't go back: and Gauguin couldn't really go back: and I know now that I could never go back.”

Reflecting on the impossibility of recovering an abandoned past unchanged · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

• Memory
• Time

“The dead don't die. They look on and help.”

Expressing a sense that the dead remain present in the lives of the living · Letter to John Middleton Murry, 2 February 1923

• Death
• Faith
• Memory