Irrevocable Quotes

“...true love is an irrevocable act - you can only give your heart away once - after that, you give as much as you have left ...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“He sighed deeply: to fall in love at first sight with this malodorous sleeping girl, with, as far as he could see, no pretensions to beauty or even good looks, was something he had not expected. But falling in love, he had always understood, was unpredictable, and, as far as he was concerned, irrevocable That they hadn't exchanged a word, nor spoken, made no difference. He, heart whole until that minute, and with no intention of marrying until it suited him, had lost that same heart.”
― Betty Neels

“In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured. To be sure, people tend to see only the stubble fields of transitoriness but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past into which they have brought the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity.
From this one may see that there is no reason to pity the old people. Instead, young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that: Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past -the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the values they have realized -and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

“You're still in it. You'll always be in it. No, not literally. But in your heart. Nothing ever ends, not if it's gone that deep. You'll always be walking wounded. That's the only choice, after a while. Walking wounded, or dead. Don't you agree?”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Only take someone's hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Because once you had been through certain things, their presence inside you never really disappeared.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“It had occurred, it had happened, and could never in his life be unhappened, never removed, a huge deadly black scar lasting forever.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“And now in her deep heart an even sharper pain was stirring, a pain which would stay with her always.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“I must think of him as vanished utterly and gone forever.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“I'll marry you, mind you, in an hour."

"As we were?"

"As we were."

But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. "We shall never be again as we were!”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“Never swim in a rough sea, dear boy, this sea's a killer. But the past refused to come back, as it did in dreams, to be remade. Titus walked in my dreams in the brightness of his youth, which was now made eternal. Or else I dreamed that he was dead and felt joy on waking.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“I'm afraid I don't know their address, but there it is, when people are gone they're gone, isn't it.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“I thought—at some level of my being, I actually thought—that I could go back to the beginning and change things. That I could make the blood flow backwards. I had the vanity to imagine—even if I didn't put it more strongly than this—that I could make Veronica like me again, and that it was important to do so.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“I replayed the words that would forever haunt me. As would Adrian's unfinished sentence: 'So, for instance, if Tony . . .' I knew I couldn't change, or mend, anything now.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“. . . solitary sinister men with terrible secrets — of whom Clement now and forever after must be one.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Deep, deepest inside his wounded heart. he felt the new pain, the pain which would now travel with him always.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“If love diminishes, it quickly fails and rarely revives.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox

“We ignore what we are doing until it is too late to alter it. We never allow ourselves quite to focus upon moments of decision; and these are often in fact hard to find even if we are searching for them.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Every action that we take exacts a cost and produces consequences. Nothing can be undone.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“I keep having this fantasy about some wide river or channel I'm on the bank of. I can look up, and on the far side is another, better self, holding hands with Mercer—that's his name, my ex—and both of them are watching me flail over here, watching me from the life I'm supposed to have had. When did it become impossible to get there from here? When did that bridge get burned?”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire