Gene Wolfe Quotes

You step over the threshold of your parents' home, and you're instantly transported back to your childhood. It's like time travel. You revert at once to a place of arrested development.

Sometimes with my children, I remember exactly how I felt as the child in this situation, not just how it feels to be me.

The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. 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.

In effect, I grew up in a sort of timewarp, a place where times are scrambled up. There are elements of my childhood that look to me now, in memory more like the 1940s or the 1950s than the 1960s. Jack [Womack] says that that made us science fiction writers, because we grew up experiencing a kind of time travel.

These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.

I'm weird; I have a very strange emotional memory. I really somehow hold on to even passing moments with people.

You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so that's what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so they'd really sink in, so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the paint and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his.

Don't you wish you could take a single childhood memory and blow it up into a bubble and live inside it forever?

Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.

A sibling is the lens through which you see your childhood.

Smell can conjure up memories for me stronger than any other sense. Especially childhood memories. Perhaps because you were that much shorter and therefore closer to the ground and its smells.

Sometimes I think the only memories I have are those that I’ve created around photographs of me as a child. Maybe I’m creating my own life. I distrust any memories I do have. They may be fictions, too.

If there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers.

Sometimes you don't know if your memory is because you really experienced it or because you look at your old pictures. I have a nice picture of myself held up by my grandfather and my father standing next to me. We all have the same name - we're all called Anton Corbijn. That's something I cherish.

I may be even more grateful to George Lucas now than I was as a kid.

(...) Since I was a kid." "Which you refer to as 'back when you were happy.'" "Right.

Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

I pictured my mom, alone in our little apartment on the Upper East Side. I tried to remember the smell of her blue waffles in the kitchen. It seemed so far away.

When we raise our children, we relive our childhood. Forgotten memories, painful and pleasurable, rise to the surface.... So each of us thinks, almost daily, of how our own childhood compares with our children's, and of what our children's future will hold.

Everything when I was a kid was illustrated.

The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived.

Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.