“This is the only means I have at present of acknowledging publicly the vast debt I owe to her.”

Verse offered as public thanks after bereavement · Foreword, Perpetual Light

• Gratitude
• Love
• Memory

“This book then, does not hold out the allurement of novelty.”

She gathered scattered songs as old acquaintances rather than new wares · Preface, Fugitive Verses, 1840

• Memory
• Modesty
• Writing

“I have been forced to conclude that a good part of bird-song is the mechanical response to what may be called hereditary memory.”

Melody treated as inheritance as much as invention · Essay, The Motif of Bird-Song, in Sylvan Secrets

• Animals
• Instinct
• Memory

“I must have been the most disappointed boy in England after I had stopped him with many apologies and put my question, for I got the answer: Twenty minutes past four, my lad. The old man was stone deaf.”

The childhood meeting that began a lifelong passion for fighting dogs · Recollection of first seeing a bull mastiff

• Animals
• Childhood
• Memory

“I know that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part.”

Grief is answered by a presence that outlasts the visible body · Letter to William Hayley, 6 May 1800

• Death
• Friendship
• Memory

“The words of Barbusse placed at the beginning of this book should be engraved over the doors of every war office of every State in the world.”

Urges official memory of war's moral defilement rather than its pageantry · Introduction to Counter-Attack and Other Poems, 1918

• Memory
• Politics
• War

“It is better to forgive insults than to forget them.”

Original: Mieux vaut pardonner aux injures que de les oublier. — The paradox suggests that forgiveness requires remembering rather than simply erasing an offence. · Tel quel (French)

• Forgiveness
• Memory
• Restraint

“Everyone feels. Only some are given the gift of preserving, like a treasure, the living memory of what they have felt. I believe these are the poets.”

Original: Todo el mundo siente. Sólo á algunos seres les es dado el guardar, como un tesoro, la memoria viva de lo que han sentido. Yo creo que éstos son los poetas. — For Bécquer, the poet's distinctive gift is preserving the life of emotion in memory. · Letter II, Cartas literarias a una mujer (Spanish)

• Feeling
• Memory
• Poetry

“When I feel, I do not write. I keep in my brain, as in a mysterious book, the impressions that have left their mark upon it.”

Original: Cuando siento no escribo. Guardo, sí, en mi cerebro escritas, como en un libro misterioso, las impresiones que han dejado en él su huella al pasar. — Bécquer describes creation as an act of recollection in which experience is allowed to settle before becoming art. · Letter II, Cartas literarias a una mujer (Spanish)

• Inspiration
• Memory
• Writing

“The memory a book leaves behind is more important than the book itself.”

Original: El recuerdo que deja un libro es más importante que el libro mismo. — The lasting emotional and intellectual impression of reading matters more than the physical book. · Prose remark, commonly attributed (Spanish)

• Books
• Memory
• Reading

“Greece, full of wonderful ruins, pleased me greatly and astonished me more than Rome. Egypt has erased Greece from my memory.”

Original: Grecja pełna ruin przecudownych podobała mi się bardzo i bardziej niż Rzym mnie zachwyciła. Egipt zatarł Grecję w mojej pamięci. — His impressions of travel are vivid enough for one landscape to eclipse another in memory. · Letter to his mother, November 1836 (Polish)

• Beauty
• Memory
• Travel

“I shall see new countries and new people, live among them, think of death at Christ's tomb, pray for those I love, and return with a heart full of memories and images.”

Original: Obaczę — nowe kraje, nowych ludzi, będę żył z nimi, pomyślę o śmierci na grobie Chrystusa. Będę się tam modlił za tych, których kocham, a potem z sercem pełnym pamiątek i obrazów wrócę do jakiej cichej europejskiej samotności. — The journey combines discovery, devotion, love and the prospect of returning to solitude. · Letter to his mother, 24 August 1836 (Polish)

• Memory
• Solitude
• Travel

“I cried with such sobbing as I had once done as a child, for that letter made me a child again.”

Original: Płakałem z takiem łkaniem jak dawniej, kiedy byłem dzieckiem, bo też list ten nanowo dzieckiem mię zrobił. — Memory and correspondence collapse the distance between the adult exile and the child he once was. · Letter to his mother, 1830s (Polish)

• Childhood
• Grief
• Memory

“It is true what people in the East say: whoever has once tasted that air returns there if he can, despite all the hardships of continual travel.”

Original: Prawda to, co powiadają ludzie wschodni, że kto raz tamtego powietrza zakosztował, to jeżeli może, nazad tam znów powraca, pomimo wszystkich niewygód ciągłej podróży. — Travel leaves an enduring longing for places that have profoundly altered one's sense of life. · Letter to his mother, 24 November 1837 (Polish)

• Longing
• Memory
• Travel

“History is not unlike Painting: their scope is the same; to represent things absent as if present, and make us acquainted with persons whom we never saw.”

He compares historical writing with painting as ways of bringing absent people and events vividly before the mind. · Preface, The History of Philosophy, 1655

• Art
• History
• Memory

“It will never leave me while I live. He is so near me often …”

Expressing the enduring presence of her son Harry three years after his death · Letter to Mrs Kappey, August 1919

• Family
• Grief
• Memory

“To remember is sometimes to suffer, but to forget would be to lose again what we once possessed.”

Exploring the painful but precious connection between memory and loss. · Journal

• Grief
• Loss
• Memory

“There are moments when the past seems more real than the present, because memory gives it a permanence that life cannot possess.”

Reflecting on the strange permanence created by memory. · Journal

• Memory
• Past
• Time

“The memory of happiness is happiness itself, and sometimes the memory is all that remains to us.”

Considering memory as a form of continuing consolation after happiness has passed. · Journal

• Happiness
• Loss
• Memory

“My earliest memory is of myself, aged a year and a half or two, in my grandparents' courtyard in Seville, playing with a lovely, utterly gentle Angora cat that retreats from my caresses onto a stool upholstered in black gutta-percha, barely within reach of my mischievous little hands.”

Original: La primera imagen mía que yo conservo en la memoria me representa de edad de año y medio o dos años en el patio de la casa de mis abuelos, en Sevilla, jugando con una preciosa—y mansísima—gata de Angora, que se refugia de mis caricias sobre una banqueta forrada de gutapercha negra, a la que apenas alcanzo con mis manecillas revoltosas. — The opening of his academy address, tracing his… · Unos versos, un alma y una época, RAE induction speech, 1938 (Spanish)

• Childhood
• Home
• Memory

“I do not ask them to forgive and forget as easily; it is not in nature that they should.”

Recognising that genuine reconciliation cannot simply demand the erasure of painful memory · Letter concerning post-Civil War reconciliation

• Forgiveness
• Memory
• Reconciliation

“The old story of the feruling was one a boy never gets over, but as for malice, it rusts soon out with me, if it belongs to my nature.”

Reflecting on childhood injury, memory and the fading of resentment · Autobiographical Notes

• Childhood
• Forgiveness
• Memory

“The sound of a voice that we have loved, even though it be changed, is one of the most touching things in the world.”

Reflecting on the emotional power of remembered voices · Memoir and literary recollection

• Emotion
• Love
• Memory

“If in a future state there shall be vacations in which we may have liberty to revisit our old home, I think one of the first places I should go to would be that mighty, awe-inspiring river, the Nile.”

Combining longing for travel with a touching vision of memory continuing beyond death · Remark concerning the Nile

• Immortality
• Memory
• Travel