James Fallows Quotes

The only thing simple about the past is that it's not now.

The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages.

People of every era believe that theirs is golden.

Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn't live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at.

I loved history because to me, history was like watching a movie.

Usually when someone says a thing is too simple, they're saying that certain familiar things aren't there, and they're seeing a couple maybe that are left, which they count as a couple, that's all.

I only know from my own personal experience, and I personally feel that there's a cyclical nature to things, so you don't want to start making generalizations about how bad things have become in comparison to the old days.

I feel it was just a few years ago I was running around in short pants.

I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.

A lot of things you see as a child remain with you... you spend a lot of your life trying to recapture the experience.

It's very easy to say that something is a shadow of itself, and it may be true in some senses.

Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

We all pine for a time in life when things were simpler. Even when they weren't necessarily simpler, hindsight makes them look a lot simpler. The reality of it was that it wasn't.

I think we all miss our childhood.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

There is always something rather absurd about the past.

I only remember the future.

Some people think of the '50s as a time of innocence, but they are misremembering it or reinventing it: if you look at the papers of the time, they are filled with dread and anxiety.

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed.

Through this feeling of helplessness suddenly burst a piercing nostalgia for the lost world of childhood. The way it came right up against the heart, that world, and against the face. No indoors or outdoors, only everything touching us, and the grown-ups lumbering past overhead like constellations.

I remember things being more clearer, at one time things were more real.

I think it's important for people to realize that we were all young, all naive, and also we had lived in a time that had magic.

We can heal. Perhaps we can return to that same place we once stood, when we were both young and innocent.

Nobody ever lived in the past.