I am packing my belongings in the shawl my mother used to wear when she went to the market. And I am going from my valley. But thi...s time I shall never return. I am leaving behind me my 50 years of memory--memory. Strange that the mind will forget so much of what only this moment has passed and yet hold clear and bright the memory of what happened years ago of men and women long since dead. Yet who shall say what is real and what is not. Can I believe this all gone when their voices are still a glory in my ears. No. And I will stand to say no and no again, for they remain within my mind. There is no fence nor hedge around time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it, if you can remember. So I can go close my eyes on my valley as it is today and it is gone. And I see it as it was when I was a boy--green it was and possessed of the plenty of the earth. In all Wales there was none so beautiful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men like my father cannot die. They are with me still, real in memory as they were in flesh, loving and beloved forever. How green... was my valley then.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For all our penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have sublime thoughts...; that all men value the few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up into the vision of principles. We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had, in the dreary years of routine and of sin, with souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke what we thought; that told us what we knew; that gave us leave to be what we only were.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not too many years ago, a child's experience was limited by how far he or she could ride a bicycle or by the physical boundaries t...hat parents set. Today ... the real boundaries of a child's life are set more by the number of available cable channels and videotapes, by the simulated reality of videogames, by the number of megabytes of memory in the home computer. Now kids can go anywhere, as long as they stay inside the electronic bubble.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I were in the unenviable position of having to study my work my points of departure would be the "Naught is more real ..." and ...the "Ubi nihil vales ..." both already in Murphy and neither very rational.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. Nothing is more real th...an nothing. They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a secret, the real now talks constantly.... News reports, information, statistics, and surveys are everywhere.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the marriage ceremony, that moment when falling in love is replaced by the arduous drama of staying in love, the words "for ric...her, for poorer, in sickness and in health,' til death us do part" set love in the temporal context in which it achieves its meaning. As time begins to elapse, one begins to love the other because they have shared the same experience, the same moments of duration. Selves may not intertwine but lives do, and shared memory becomes as much of a bond as the bond of the flesh. One might say shared memory is not love itself but a consequence of being in love; but in what people commonly say about long-lasting love, it is the attitudes toward time implied in such words such as constancy and fidelity that recur.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »