Barbara Tuchman Quotes

The older you get, the more you find yourself looking for things you used to see and liked when you were younger.

When we bring back with us the objects most dear, and find those we left unchanged, we are tempted to doubt the lapse of time; but one link in the chain of affection broken, and every thing seems altered.

I was amazed at the house that I grew up in; it looks practically identical to the way it was, but I couldn't recognize it because of the size of the trees.

Nostalgia is, 'Hey, remember the other mall that used to be there?'

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

I still live in the same place I've lived all my life.

The past is a country from which we have all emigrated

I always miss any kind of constant, especially now that I'm a film-maker who travels all the time. I'm always tempted to go to Catholic churches, although I despise the religion. But you want to go there just because it's the one thing in your life that's never changed.

The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.

This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.

It is unpleasant to miss even the most trifling thing to which we have been accustomed.

AT first Raoden stayed away from the library, because it reminded him of her. Then he found himself drawn back to it—because it reminded him of her.

Whatever you may be missing right now - a person, a place, a feeling, maybe you are injured and missing running - whatever it is, have peace and take heart - remember that any goodbye makes room for a hello.

We are all our own graveyards, I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived, and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.

Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library.

O Time and change! - with hair as gray as was my sire's that winter day, how strange it seems, with so much gone of life and love, to still live on!

After they remodeled Yankee Stadium I didn't feel that the ghosts were there anymore. It just wasn't the same.

How some they have died, and some they have left me, And some are taken from me; all are departed; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

When I thinkof my own native land, In a moment I seem to be there; But alas! recollection at hand Soon hurries me back to despair.

There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed bear, what moves us about many objects is not what remains but what has vanished. There comes a time, thanks to rivers, when a few beautiful old teeth are all that remain of the two-hundred-foot spires of life we call trees. There comes a river, whose current is time, that does a similar sculpting in the mind.

It's never safe to be nostalgic about something until you're absolutely certain there's no chance of its coming back

It was hard to remember what the yard had looked like even twelve hours before, undisturbed and pristine. Like it takes so little to change something, but to make you forget the way it once was, as well.

He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands.

So sad! This is the saddest part when you lose someone you love- that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, Is this the same person I lost?

Good-night! good-night! as we so oft have said Beneath this roof at midnight, in the days That are no more, and shall no more return. Thou hast but taken up thy lamp and gone to bed; I stay a little longer, as one stays To cover up the embers that still burn.