Only time brings rise to memory, and over time it fades— memory lives and dies in time.
I do not mean to recreate the moments lost, simply to preserve them in some form, a shadow, a ghost.
But if I now shut my eyes, if I fail to realize the meeting-place of past and present... human history is defrauded of a moment’s vision. Its eye, that would see through me, shuts— if I sleep now through slovenliness, or cowardice, burying myself in the past, in the dark…
(Virginia Woolf, The Waves, p. 46)
If I see and think and swim the reflection, it is because at the other extreme there is the sun, which casts its rays. Only the origin of what is matters: something that my gaze cannot confront except an attenuated form, as in this sunset. All the rest is reflection among reflections, me included.
(Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar, p. 15)