In many ways life is less random than we think. In your past and mine, there have been times when we have, on some lonely trail, constructed a device aimed into our future. Perhaps nothing ever comes along to trigger it. We live through the safe years. But, for some people, something moves on the half-forgotten path, and something arches out of the past and explodes in the here and now. These are emotional intersections, when lives cross, diverge, then meet again.

At certain periods of life, we live years of emotion in a few weeks, and look back on those times as on great gaps between the old life and the new.

Even painful memories are ties that bind.

Something about the elderly altered the character of a place, civilized it, creating a bridge between past and present, a sense of continuity across generations.

These Memoirs have been composed at different dates and in different countries. For this reason, I have been obliged to add some prefatory passages which describe the places that I had before my eyes and the feelings that were in my heart when the thread of my narrative was resumed. The changing forms of my life are thus intermingled. It has sometimes happened that, in my moments of prosperity, I have had to speak of times when I was poor, and in my days of tribulation, to retrace days when I was happy. My childhood entering into my old age, the gravity of experience weighing on the lightness of youth, the rays of my sun mingling and merging together, from its dawn to its dusk, have produced in my stories a kind of confusion, or, if you will, a kind of ineffable unity.

There are moments when the eyes flow into each other. Then the souls are wrapped around each other across a distance

forming bridges of correspondence from old to new worlds.

She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: we are at the last station. The happiness meant: we are together.

Our time is a time to cross barriers, for erasing old categories — for probing around. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result

It was strange, I reflected, as we went out into the golden evening of the Byzantine streets, that even in the weirdest circumstances, the most troubling episodes of one’s life, the greatest divides from home and familiarity, there were these moments of undeniable joy.

Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of the horizon

they say that time heals all things,
they say you can always forget;
but the smiles and the tears across the years
they twist my heart strings yet!

We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.

There exist moments in life, separated by long intervals of time, but linked together by their inner content and by a certain singular sensation peculiar to them. Several such moments always recur to my mind together, and I feel then that it is these that have determined the chief trend of my life.