Out of the old House, Nancy, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
“Touch has a memory. O say, love, say,
What can I do to kill it and be free?”
Variant: Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.
Source: The Glass Menagerie
"Under the Harvest Moon" (1916)
Context: Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.
Source: A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last
A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (1988)
Variant: Memories were fine but you couldn't touch them, smell them or hold them. They were never exactly as the moment was, and they faded with time.
“The male has a negative Midas Touch - everything he touches turns to shit.”
Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. 5 (hyphen (not en- or em-dash) so in original).
Memories of Ice (2001)
