Irretrievable Quotes & Sayings

I'll put it out there: I am scarred by the nostalgic indicipherability of my own desires; I an engulfed by the intimidating unknown, pushed through darkness and dragged down by the irretrievable past sweetness of my memories. — Anne Sexton

What good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable. — Khaled Hosseini

The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable. — Joyce Carol Oates

Infancy is irretrievable. Its memories live underground. To what extent they return by stealth or are triggered by various catalysts remains an ongoing question. — Siri Hustvedt

I am not an irretrievable skeptic. I am not hopelessly prejudiced. I am perfectly willing to believe, and my mind is wide open; but I have, as yet, to be convinced. I am perfectly willing, but the evidence must be sane and conclusive. — Harry Houdini

She had felt good for a few moments, racing across the face of the hill on her old bike, but the happy feeling had burned itself out and left behind a thin, cold rage. She was no longer entirely sure who she was angry with though. Her anger didn't have a fixed point. It was a soft whir of emotion to match the soft whir of the spokes. — Joe Hill

The Character which a youth acquires in the early part of his Life is of great importance towards his future prosperity-one false step may prove irretrievable to his future usefulness. — Abigail Adams

Once things have passed and become irretrievable, we tend to see them with a hazy, golden glow. — Walter Murch

The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable. — Boris Pasternak

This feeling that
contrary to the consciously philosophic and historical conception which proclaims unceasing and peaceful progress
one is experiencing a last brief, irretrievable intellectual prime of humanity manifests itself in the greatest representatives of this period in different ways, in keeping with the unconscious character of this feeling. — Gyorgy Lukacs

We do not know what it's like to be a bat, we do not know what it's like to be in coma. we can't even say that we know what it's like to be sleeping. We can say what it's like to be restored to consciousness after sleeping. If there are no dreams during our sleep then the sleeping life is an empty life. We might say of such a life that it's not like being anything. We protect that life on the assumption that come the morning its normal functions will be restored. Suppose it was the case however that such functions were only restored every two days... every eight days... twice a year but only briefly. I assume the point is clear. Actions that end life are irretrievable. If we are mistaken at that point there is no going back. — Daniel N. Robinson

Maybe my homesickness was a form of prescience because when I look back, it's the circumstances of this very car ride that I recognize as irretrievable: the experience of driving nowhere in particular with my sister, both of us seventeen years old, the open windows causing our hair to blow wildly; that feeling of being unencumbered; that confidence that our futures would inform the way we wanted them to and our real lives were just beginning. — Curtis Sittenfeld

My friend, be not like him who sits by his fireside and watches the fire go out, then blows vainly upon the dead ashes. Do not give up hope or yield to despair because of that which is past, for to bewail the irretrievable is the worst of human frailties. — Khalil Gibran

If the supernatural in a conventional sense is no longer possible, what remains after the "death of God" is an occulted, hidden world. Philosophically speaking, the enigma we face is how to confront this world, without immediately presuming that it is identical to the world-for-us (the world of science and religion), and without simply disparaging it as an irretrievable and inaccessible world-in-itself. — Eugene Thacker

The Night Dances A smile fell in the grass. Irretrievable! And how will your night dances Lose themselves. In mathematics? Such pure leaps and spirals - - Surely they travel The world forever, I shall not entirely Sit emptied of beauties, the gift Of your small breath, the drenched grass Smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies. Their flesh bears no relation. Cold folds of ego, the calla, And the tiger, embellishing itself - - — Sylvia Plath

Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretenses are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage. — Iris Murdoch

I like revisiting, at certain times, spots where I was once happy; I like to shape the present in the image of the irretrievable past. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The past was irretrievable, the league of lonely men a fiction, the pursuit of the past a doomed attempt to run a hustle on mortality. — Michael Chabon

This is how people behave when their dailiness is destroyed, when for a few moments they see, plain and unadorned, one of the great shaping forces of life. Calamity fixes them with her mesmeric eye, and they begin to scoop and paw at the rubble of their days, trying to pluck the memory of the quotidian - a toy, a book, a garment, even a photograph - from the garbage heaps of the irretrievable, of their overwhelming loss. — Salman Rushdie

There's a considerable distance between seeking perfection and irretrievable haste, — Naomi Novik

Who had been fighting with someone they loved?
Going at it long enough to unleash the irretrievable words they knew to say only because they had been trusted to know what would hurt the most. — Bill Clegg

Greeting the ageing self In trying to depathologize age, we need to make an important distinction, between resisting ageism (stereotyping or discriminating on the basis of age) and resisting age itself. The first opens the door to a path of rich potential, freeing us to keep on developing and changing, while the second closes it, condemning us to an endless attempt to recover the irretrievable. — Anne Karpf

Once lost, a wilderness resource is irretrievable. But once won, a battle may need to be fought again and again. Until an area receives the relative permanence of formal protection, a threat initially forestalled may repeatedly rear it's head. Defenders must be alert each time, and they must win each time, for if they lose but once, all earlier victories are obviously erased. It is, in every sense, a lopsided struggle. — David Knibb

Unhappy as the event must be for Lydia, we may draw from it this useful lesson: that loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable; that one false step involves her in endless ruin; that her reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful; and that she cannot be too much guarded in her behaviour towards the undeserving of the other sex. — Jane Austen

It was unbearable, he would not think about it, he could not stand it...There was a terrible hollow inside him he did not want to feel or examine, a dark hole where Sirius had been, where Sirius had vanished. He did not want to have to be alone with that great, silent space, he could not stand it ---

...

To say it aloud would be to make it final, absolute, irretrievable. p. 821 — J.K. Rowling

Why does this forever gone, irretrievable time, why does it seem brighter, more festive and rich, than it was in reality? — Anton Chekhov

The colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say with the help of the army and the police force, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil. Native society is not simply described as a society lacking in values. It is not enough for the colonist to affirm that those values have disappeared from, or still better never existed in, the colonial world. The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depository of maleficent powers, the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces. — Frantz Fanon

His philosophy of life had been that we only live once.
Now there had matured in him the sense of another truth about himself and the world: that we have only one conscience - and that a crippled conscience is as irretrievable as a lost life. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There's no reason anyone should ever feel lonely when there's love everywhere. There's no excuse for talented people to trudge through life. And if we weigh down our children, the very source that makes the stars blaze in the sky, then we may wake to realize we've lost something irretrievable. — Sarah Noffke

Jew storekeepers have already learned the advantage to be gained from this [unlimited credit]: they lead on the farmer into irretrievable indebtedness, and keep him ever after as their bondslave hopelessly grinding in the mill. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Fret not over the irretrievable, but ever act as if thy life were just begun. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

That loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable-- that one false step involves her in endless ruin-- that her reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful-- and that she cannot be too much guarded in her behavior towards the undeserving of the opposite sex." ~Mary Bennett, P&P — Jane Austen

It started when we were little kids.
Free spirits, but already
tormented by our own hands
given to us by our parents.
We got together and wrote on desks
and slept in laundry rooms near snowy mountains
and slipped through whatever
cracks we could find,
minds altered, we didn't falter
in portraving hysterical and
tragic characters in a smog
filled universe.
we loved the dirty city
and the journeys away from it.
We had not yet been or seen our friends, selves,
chase tails round and round in downward spirals,
leaving trail of irretrievable,
vital life juice behind.
Still, the
brothersbloodcomradespartnerfamilycuzz
was impenetrable
and we lived inside it
laughing with no clothes, and
everything experimental 'till
death was upon us.
In our face, mortality. — Anthony Kiedis

War is catastrophe. It breaks families in irretrievable pieces. But those who are gone are not necessarily lost. — Ruta Sepetys

The safe and general antidote against sorrow is employment. It is commonly observed, that among soldiers and seamen, though there is much kindness, there is little grief; they see their friend fall without any of that lamentation which is indulged in security and idleness, because they have no leisure to spare from the care of themselves; and whoever shall keep his thoughts equally busy will find himself equally unaffected with irretrievable losses. — Samuel Johnson

The loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable - that one false step involves in her endless ruin - that her reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful - and that she cannot be too much guarded in her behavior towards the undeserving of the opposite sex. — Jane Austen

Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression. — Cynthia Ozick

But chains made out of blood and memory were a thousand times more difficult to sever than those made of steel, and the past could overtake a person if she wasn't careful"
"The day had begun, cool and clear and absolutely impossible to avoid"
"Being a physician is like working on a machine that keeps breaking down, time after time"
"Honesty was like a stone, dropped and irretrievable once it was spoken aloud"
"Love was like that, like a dream you didn't quite understand, one in which you didn't necessarily know what you were looking at until it was right in front of you"
"adolescence is what makes the person — Alice Hoffman

Pain-soaked joints. Endless miles. Concessions and compromises. Soon, finally, everything would come down to a few irretrievable revolutions of a stopwatch. — Lisa Luciano

Time lost to pointless delay can never be regained. It is the most reprehensible kind of theft. Why was it that men did not grasp this simple fact? Money comes and goes and comes again, and knowledge can be acquired and forgotten and rediscovered, but time once lost is lost for good, each passing second irretrievable. — John Pipkin

Like many men and women who make egregious and irretrievable mistakes with their own children, she would redeem herself by becoming the perfect grandmother. — Pat Conroy

In short, the right given to one man to inflict corporal punishment on another is one of the ulcers of society, one of the most powerful destructive agents of every germ and every budding attempt at civilization, the fundamental cause of its certain and irretrievable destruction. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

None of it could be reduced to something as simple as invader and invaded. Baru saw in the city what she felt in herself. The two-faced allegiances, the fearful monitoring of self and surroundings, the whimpering need to please somehow kneeling alongside marrow-deep defiance. One eye set on a future of glittering wealthy subservience, the other turned to a receding and irretrievable freedom. The liquor of empire, alluring and corrosive at once, saturating everything, every old division of sex and race and history, remaking it all with the promise and the threat of power. — Seth Dickinson

Honesty was like a stone, dropped and irretrievable once it was spoken aloud — Alice Hoffman

He looked back at her, and when she saw the look on his face, she saw his eyes at Renwick's, when he had watched the Portal that separated him from his home shatter into a thousand irretrievable pieces. He held her gaze for a split second, then looked away from her, the muscles in his throat working. — Cassandra Clare

Too much - too tempting - to have my hands on it and not look at it. Quickly I slid it out, and almost immediately its glow enveloped me, something almost musical, an internal sweetness that was inexplicable beyond a deep, blood-rocking harmony of rightness, the way your heart beat slow and sure when you were with a person you felt safe with and loved. A power, a shine, came off it, a freshness like the morning light in my old bedroom in New York which was serene yet exhilarating, a light that rendered everything sharp-edged and yet more tender and lovely than it actually was, and lovelier still because it was part of the past, and irretrievable: wallpaper glowing, the old Rand McNally globe in half-shadow. — Donna Tartt

I believe that the experience of childhood is irretrievable. All that remains, for any of us, is a headful of brilliant frozen moments, already dangerously distorted by the wisdoms of maturity. — Penelope Lively

Everyone lives through this difficult period. For the average person it's the point in his life when the demands of his own life clash most violently with the world around him, when his forward path must be fought for most bitterly. Many experience this death and rebirth, which are our destiny, only this once in their life, when childhood decays and slowly disintegrates, when all that has become dear to us is about to leave us and we suddenly feel the solitude and deathly chill of outer space around us. And very many are hung up for good on this reef and for the rest of their life cling painfully to the irretrievable past, to the dream of the lost paradise, which is the worst and most murderous of all dreams. — Hermann Hesse

Every death of those you love is the death also of so many shared memories and understanding, of a now irretrievable part of your own life. — Richard Flanagan

The concept of reconciliation is not irretrievable, but I am convinced that before we theologians can interpret the depths of the divine action of reconciliation we must first articulate the profound deformities of Christian intimacy and identity in modernity. Until we do, all theological discussions of reconciliation will be exactly what they tend to be: (a) ideological tools for facilitating negotiations of power; or (b) socially exhausted idealist claims masquerading as serious theological accounts. In truth, it is not at all clear that most Christians are ready to imagine reconciliation. — Willie James Jennings

This, she thought, isn't just for today. It's for everything. For the heartache that still felt like a punch in the gut each time it struck, fresh as new, at unpredictable moments; for the smiling lies and the mental images she couldn't shake; for the shame of having been so naive.
For the way loneliness is worse when you return to it after a reprieve - like the soul's version of putting on a wet bathing suit, clammy and miserable.
And this, Karou thought, no longer smiling, is for the irretrievable. — Laini Taylor

My greatest point is my persistence. I never give up in a match. However down I am, I fight until the last ball. My list of matches shows that I have turned a great many so-called irretrievable defeats into victories. — Bjorn Borg

At times, my nostalgia for our family life as it used to be
for our own imperfect, cherished, irretrievable past
is nearly overwhelming. — Katrina Kenison

Sometimes that's what happens. No cigarette burns, no bone snaps. Just an irretrievable slipping. — Gillian Flynn

At the beach, fifty years later, the old man understands finally that much of what he disavowed in himself before recognizing its irretrievable value, most of the heartache he caused himself and those who chose to love him, came out of that repudiation of his true self.

Such is the power of denial, the old man now realizes: a comforting ally in our struggles for survival, a fierce foe in our quest for ourselves. Denial finds us when we feel most alone, and only alone can we banish this demon that bars the long way home. — Lionel Fisher

Loss and loneliness, loneliness being the sadder and grayer of the two. Loss means that someone beloved is irretrievable, and as bad as that is, a person can eventually accept the fact of permanent absence. But loneliness is terrible because it's specific, open-ended, and alive. You want precisely whom you want, no one else, and it's torturous because they're out there somewhere but you can't be with them - and that's when you realize that the hollow isolation in your gut will never go away. — T.M. Goeglein