Through permanent childhood we maintain the poetry of the past

The house we were born in has engraved within us the hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting.

[...]

The house we were born in is more than an embodiment of home, it is also an embodiment of dreams.

[...]

It is on the plane of the daydream and not on that of facts that childhood remains alive and poetically useful within us. Through this permanent childhood, we maintain the poetry of the past. To inhabit oneirically the house we were born in means more than to inhabit it in memory; it means living in this house that is gone, the way we used to dream in it.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) pp. 15-16

Beauty and loss are one

A man was coming down the road driving a donkey piled high with firewood. In the distance the church bells had begun. The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of the claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transiencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.

Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (Picador, 2011) p. 72

Without memory, time would be unarmed against us

"Mr. Trask, do you think the thoughts of people suddenly become important at a given age? Do you have sharper feelings or clearer thoughts now than when you were ten? Do you see as well, hear as well, taste as vitally?"
"Maybe you're right," said Adam.
"It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me," said Lee, "that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to a man."
"And memory."
"Yes, memory. Without that, time would be unarmed against us."

John Steinbeck, East of Eden (Penguin Books, 2000) p. 458

The world is always new

"The world is always new," said Coro Mean, "however old its roots."

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest (The Orion Publishing Group, 2015) p. 32