“But I am returned; good things more endeared to me than ever; and when I saw Calais to-day, and remembered what I was when I first saw it, in 1802, I felt overwhelmed and humbled with a sense of being richer, wiser, and happier.”

Looking back across decades and measuring the inward changes of a lifetime · Travel journal, 2 November 1835

• Joy
• Memory
• Time

“Why is it one lingers, as if reluctant to leave a scene of powerful and even painful emotion? It must be from the love of excitement; a love which few outgrow.”

Reflecting on the human attraction to places charged with painful emotion · Scottish travel journal, 1834

• Memory
• Truth

“It so overpowered me, that I could not read it through at first, and wept because the eye it would most have pleased, would not see it.”

Literary praise becomes poignant because a beloved witness was no longer alive · Remark on Southey's Colloquies, 1829

• Art
• Death
• Memory

“I have had pleasing and gratifying things to relate; but, alas! he, to whom the relation would have given such pleasure, is gone; and even on the instant my pleasure has been swallowed up in pain.”

Capturing how bereavement can suddenly transform pleasure into grief · Letter, 29 June 1827

• Death
• Memory

“How much were they to me in my darkest hours; how true and tender their sympathy! never to be forgotten. How can I help feeling for them who felt so much for me?”

Gratitude for friendship becoming a reason to extend compassion in return · Journal, January 1827

• Friendship
• Memory

“The heart that has once truly loved, never forgets.”

Expressing the enduring power of love and memory · Commonly attributed to Amelia Opie

• Love
• Memory