'I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.'
—Maya Angelou

'For most of our lives the days pass waywardly, without meaning, without particular happiness or unhappiness. Then, like turning over a tapestry when you have only seen the back of it, there is spread the pattern.'
—Jane Gardam, Crusoe's Daughter

'I am not averse to disappointment. It has its own special pleasures. Disappointment is the hidden agenda within fantasy, a nugget for the aficionado who might trick up the bland negativity of the word by sliding alphabetically towards disjunction and disparity. If you could have what you dream about, if I could have Antarctica all white and solitary and boundless, there would finally be no excuse. Imagine, you are exactly where you want to be — and now what? Yes white, yes solitary, yes boundless, but will it, in its icy, empty, immense reality, do? In my head, it does fine, why seek out the final disappointment which the earlier, smaller disappointment only seeks to prevent? The point of desire is desire itself, the essential pleasure in expectation is expectation. The idea that gratification is a completion of the wish is fallacious. It is only our dim literal-mindedness that makes us believe that we should try to achieve what we wish for. Disappointment stands between the two like a guardian angel. The fissure between what I want and what I can have is my friend, my best friend in all likelihood, and I know it. Disappointment is a safety net, to be relished in a secret knowing way by the disappointed.'
—Jenny Diski, Skating to Antarctica

Forgetting someone is like forgetting to turn off the light in the backyard so it stays lit all the next day

But then it is the light that makes you remember.
—Yehuda Amichai

... He shrank a little, however, from choosing even this pleasant pathway. He had planned many futures for himself and learnt to love them all. It was this that had made him linger on at Ballah for so long, and it was this that now kept him undecided. He would have to give up the universe for a garden and three gardeners. How sad it was to make substantial even the best of his dreams. How hard it was to submit to that decree which compels every step we take in life to be a death in the imagination. How difficult it was to be so enwrapped in this one new hope as not to hear the lamentations that were going on in dim corners of his mind.
—W.B. Yeats, John Sherman (1891)