#remembrance

Sixty-five years ago [written 2009], in a brief lull between storms in a remarkably stormy June, even by the standards of Channel weather, the heirs of Harold and the kinsmen of the Conqueror came to Normandy. They were supported by the remnants of their first, North American, empire, the two great nations that they had planted in the New World in the time of Good Queen Bess and James 6th and 1st: the Americans, who had rebelled in the name of the rights of Englishmen, and the Canadians, who had stood loyal in the name of the Crown. … The honours of these regiments are ancient and moving: Minden and Malplaquet, Mysore, Badajoz, Waterloo, Inkerman, Gallipoli, the Somme, Imjin. None shines more brightly than Normandy 1944. The paths of glory may lead but to the grave; yet all, even golden boys and girls, must come to dust. It is a better path to the grave than any of the others, not because glory is something to seek, but because, not once or twice in our long island story, the way of duty has been the path to glory; and duty is to be done. …Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us. ↗

— G.M.W. Wemyss

#military-history #normandy #remembrance #second-world-war #men

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived. ↗

— Frederick Buechner

#remembering #remembrance #consciousness

Of joys departed, not to return, how painful the remembrance. ↗

— Robert Blair

#how #joys #painful #remembrance #return

Black History Month must be more than just a month of remembrance; it should be a tribute to our history and reminder of the work that lies in the months and years ahead. ↗

— Marty Meehan

#black #black history #history #just #lies

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. ↗

— John Keats

#almost #appear #highest #his #own

I know not why there is such a melancholy feeling attached to the remembrance of past happiness, except that we fear that the future can have nothing so bright as the past. ↗

— Julia Ward Howe

#bright #except #fear #feeling #future

Most men remember obligations, but are not often likely to be grateful; the proud are made sour by the remembrance and the vain silent. ↗

— William Gilmore Simms

#grateful #likely #made #men #most

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them. ↗

— Laurence Binyon

#war #ww #age

Do you remember those days? Back porch, sunshine, mason jars" - she paused at remembered sweetness - "we were so foolish then...thinking there was a big ol' world out there to conquer. ↗

— Melissa Marr

#memory #past #remembrance #age

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#remembrance #the-past #beauty