Help me find a quote like this
July 14, 2015 5:51 PM Subscribe
I'm trying to find a quote that fits the general mood of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "Spirited Away". I know that is a weird mix, but the more layered and moody the quote is the better. Something about memories, yearning, and remembrance. And not that Alexander Pope quote that was mentioned in ETOSM please. Any ideas?
"Mais, quand d’un passé ancien rien ne subsiste, après la mort des êtres, après la destruction des choses, seules, plus frêles mais plus vivaces, plus immatérielles, plus persistantes, plus fidèles, l’odeur et la saveur restent encore longtemps, comme des âmes, à se rappeler, à attendre, à espérer, sur la ruine de tout le reste, à porter sans fléchir, sur leur gouttelette presque impalpable, l’édifice immense du souvenir."
When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
-Proust, Swann's Way
posted by juv3nal at 6:33 PM on July 14, 2015 [7 favorites]
When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
-Proust, Swann's Way
posted by juv3nal at 6:33 PM on July 14, 2015 [7 favorites]
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.
- children's nursery rhyme
posted by St. Peepsburg at 6:48 PM on July 14, 2015 [6 favorites]
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.
- children's nursery rhyme
posted by St. Peepsburg at 6:48 PM on July 14, 2015 [6 favorites]
You cannot make Remembrance grow
When it has lost its Root --
The tightening the Soil around
And setting it upright
Deceives perhaps the Universe
But not retrieves the Plant --
(Emily Dickinson)
posted by third rail at 7:50 PM on July 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
When it has lost its Root --
The tightening the Soil around
And setting it upright
Deceives perhaps the Universe
But not retrieves the Plant --
(Emily Dickinson)
posted by third rail at 7:50 PM on July 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
Something about memories, yearning, and remembrance.
In the broader context of Citizen Kane:
In the broader context of Citizen Kane:
Reporter: If you could've found out what Rosebud meant, I bet that would've explained everything.posted by SpacemanStix at 8:03 PM on July 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
Jerry Thompson: No, I don't think so; no. Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get, or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn't have explained anything... I don't think any word can explain a man's life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a... piece in a jigsaw puzzle... a missing piece.
From The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa:
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.posted by SpacemanStix at 8:10 PM on July 14, 2015 [13 favorites]
Here's also the beginning of a poem by Walt Whitman called Longings for Home:
O MAGNET-SOUTH! O glistening, perfumed South! My South!posted by SpacemanStix at 8:16 PM on July 14, 2015 [3 favorites]
O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse, and love! Good and evil! O all dear to me!
O dear to me my birth-things—All moving things, and the trees where I was born—the grains, plants, rivers;
Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow, distant, over flats of silvery sands, or through swamps;
Dear to me the Roanoke, the Savannah, the Altamahaw, the Pedee, the Tombigbee, the Santee, the Coosa, and the Sabine; 5
O pensive, far away wandering, I return with my Soul to haunt their banks again;
Yes, Whitman works nicely:
A river man, or a man of the woods or of any farm-life
of these States or of the coast, or the lakes or
Kanada,
Me wherever my life is lived, O to be self-balanced for
contingencies,
To confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents,
rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.
posted by PussKillian at 8:34 PM on July 14, 2015
A river man, or a man of the woods or of any farm-life
of these States or of the coast, or the lakes or
Kanada,
Me wherever my life is lived, O to be self-balanced for
contingencies,
To confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents,
rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.
posted by PussKillian at 8:34 PM on July 14, 2015
This poem by Izumi Shikibu.
Even if I now saw youposted by nicebookrack at 8:59 PM on July 14, 2015 [17 favorites]
only once,
I would long for you
through worlds,
worlds.
"There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won't remember and that she can't even let herself think about because that's when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it's always raining a slow and endless drizzle.
You will hear that she has left the country, that there was a gift she wanted you to have, but it is lost before it reaches you. Late one night the telephone will sign, and a voice that might be hers will say something that you cannot interpret before the connection crackles and is broken.
Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time you persuade the driver to stop. You will never see her again.
Whenever it rains you will think of her."
-Neil Gaiman
posted by quincunx at 9:52 PM on July 14, 2015 [2 favorites]
You will hear that she has left the country, that there was a gift she wanted you to have, but it is lost before it reaches you. Late one night the telephone will sign, and a voice that might be hers will say something that you cannot interpret before the connection crackles and is broken.
Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time you persuade the driver to stop. You will never see her again.
Whenever it rains you will think of her."
-Neil Gaiman
posted by quincunx at 9:52 PM on July 14, 2015 [2 favorites]
Time Does Not Bring Relief
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay
posted by carmicha at 9:54 PM on July 14, 2015 [10 favorites]
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay
posted by carmicha at 9:54 PM on July 14, 2015 [10 favorites]
Even in Kyoto—
hearing the cuckoo's cry—
I long for Kyoto.
-- Kobayashi Issa
posted by oflinkey at 10:24 AM on July 15, 2015 [4 favorites]
hearing the cuckoo's cry—
I long for Kyoto.
-- Kobayashi Issa
posted by oflinkey at 10:24 AM on July 15, 2015 [4 favorites]
Poem by Sappho:
You may forget butposted by pjenks at 2:37 PM on July 15, 2015 [4 favorites]
let me tell you
this: someone in
some future time
will think of us.
This poem really reminds me of Eternal Sunshine on a Spotless Mind - struggling with fading memories.
Billy Collins
Forgetfulness
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
posted by guy72277 at 1:32 AM on July 16, 2015 [1 favorite]
Billy Collins
Forgetfulness
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
posted by guy72277 at 1:32 AM on July 16, 2015 [1 favorite]
Haku helps Chihiro and tells her not to forget her real name and that if her parents remain as pigs too long, they will forget they were ever human.
Steve Goodman's The Dutchman is a lovely, lovely song about an old Dutch couple who've been married for years, and now the husband is senile and the wife is taking care of him.
I always lose it on the last two lines...
"The Dutchman still wears wooden shoes,
His cap and coat are patched with the love
That Margaret sewed there.
Sometimes he thinks he's still in Rotterdam.
And he watches the tug-boats down canals
An' calls out to them when he thinks he knows the Captain.
Till Margaret comes to take him home again
Through unforgiving streets that trip him, though she holds his arm,
Sometimes he thinks he's alone and he calls her name.
Let us go to the banks of the ocean
Where the walls rise above the Zuider Zee.
Long ago, I used to be a young man
And dear Margaret remembers that for me."
posted by guy72277 at 1:38 AM on July 16, 2015 [1 favorite]
Steve Goodman's The Dutchman is a lovely, lovely song about an old Dutch couple who've been married for years, and now the husband is senile and the wife is taking care of him.
I always lose it on the last two lines...
"The Dutchman still wears wooden shoes,
His cap and coat are patched with the love
That Margaret sewed there.
Sometimes he thinks he's still in Rotterdam.
And he watches the tug-boats down canals
An' calls out to them when he thinks he knows the Captain.
Till Margaret comes to take him home again
Through unforgiving streets that trip him, though she holds his arm,
Sometimes he thinks he's alone and he calls her name.
Let us go to the banks of the ocean
Where the walls rise above the Zuider Zee.
Long ago, I used to be a young man
And dear Margaret remembers that for me."
posted by guy72277 at 1:38 AM on July 16, 2015 [1 favorite]
And finally this is one of my favourite quotes about remembering. It's from an article titled "If Memory Doesn't Serve" by Ian Frazier, which was published in The Atlantic.
The brain has only so many slots, and by the time you reach fifty they have become cluttered and full. My son, who is eleven, has a memory like wet cement. Occurrences leave impressions on it and are there to stay—clear, manifest, close at hand. Like apparently all children today, he has an effortless affinity with gadgetry that exhausts me just to look at it. I call him when I want some advanced appliance turned off or on. Even more useful is his ability to replay data he has observed. Ask him what we were talking about before we started talking about what we're talking about now, and he knows. He always retrieves the thread of a conversation in a manner that's matter-of-fact or bored.
For me, however, the feeling at these moments is a vast and happy relief. When you've been trying to remember something and you suddenly remember it, the mental pleasure is keen. Not remembering eats at you, but remembering soothes and resoothes. I imagine that feeling might be what heaven is like. You pop through to the other side, and suddenly every question you have wondered about for years and then given up on is answered. The fate of an object lost in childhood, the names of people met only once at a cocktail party, the difference between H. G. Wells, George Orwell and Orson Welles—every answer coming to you in a limpid rush of enlightenment, as if you'd known it all along.
posted by guy72277 at 1:43 AM on July 16, 2015
The brain has only so many slots, and by the time you reach fifty they have become cluttered and full. My son, who is eleven, has a memory like wet cement. Occurrences leave impressions on it and are there to stay—clear, manifest, close at hand. Like apparently all children today, he has an effortless affinity with gadgetry that exhausts me just to look at it. I call him when I want some advanced appliance turned off or on. Even more useful is his ability to replay data he has observed. Ask him what we were talking about before we started talking about what we're talking about now, and he knows. He always retrieves the thread of a conversation in a manner that's matter-of-fact or bored.
For me, however, the feeling at these moments is a vast and happy relief. When you've been trying to remember something and you suddenly remember it, the mental pleasure is keen. Not remembering eats at you, but remembering soothes and resoothes. I imagine that feeling might be what heaven is like. You pop through to the other side, and suddenly every question you have wondered about for years and then given up on is answered. The fate of an object lost in childhood, the names of people met only once at a cocktail party, the difference between H. G. Wells, George Orwell and Orson Welles—every answer coming to you in a limpid rush of enlightenment, as if you'd known it all along.
posted by guy72277 at 1:43 AM on July 16, 2015
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― Nicholas Sparks, Dear John
posted by OrangeDisk at 6:20 PM on July 14, 2015 [1 favorite]