Shirley Hazzard

"Looking at Luisa, Tancredi wondered: How can you bear it, this memory, this recollecting of things utterly and unthinkably past? He himself was already finding it intolerable to remember--not merely the people he would never speak with again, or the houses in which he could never hope to see them, but fragments of mood, light, sensation, which he couldn't recapture and which, revealing themselves to him only in the subsequent act of remembering, then seemed to remain permanently and to accumulate significance in direct proportion to their increasing remoteness in his experience. The very word experience, at that moment, was more poignant to him than grief or love."

The Evening of the Holiday by Shirley Hazzard
Penguin Books, Ringwood,Victoria, 1969
Page 97