Gertrude Jekyll Quotes

That reminds me of something that happened to me when I was a kid.

One of things I like about looking at pictures when you're young and also meeting back with old friends you haven't seen in a long time is, for me, it's a glimpse of who I was.

More often than not, my reference point is not the kids or the grandkids but myself when I was that age. I remember the days at Hartranft Elementary and Stewart Junior High in Norristown.

I remember everything from 1976. I remember I was 14, and I remember my routines.

When I write about things, it's a lot to do with sense memory. How things smell and taste can bring incredible memories flooding back and transport you in an instant to another time and place.

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

The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.

I like to capture moments. It's like a photograph. Ten years from now you look at the photograph and you don't remember it but rather the whole week or month around the photo.

Music and smells are the most memory-recall, nostalgia-inducing things.

These interviews, sometimes they jog your memories, like what you were doing when you were 10 years old. They're always searching for your past; they can keep you living there. I want to go on to the future.

I immerse myself in things that meant something to me while I was growing up.

I'm quite nostalgic. I like looking back over the papers and watching videos.

I have very strong memories of my early years. In fact, I remember the house I was born in, and we moved from that house when I was less than ten months old. I have drawn pictures of it and shown my mother, and she was shocked because we have no photos of the place, and I was very accurate.

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

If I had known I'd be on Matador back then in my childhood, it would have blown my mind.

As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.

I've never had any interest in retelling stories from my youth.

Do you remember your childhood? I am always coming across these marvelous accounts by writers who declare that they remember 'everything.' I certainly don't. The dark stretches, the blanks, are much bigger than the bright glimpses. I seem to have spent most of my time like a plant in a cupboard.

It's like I'm stuck in a time bubble. Memories keep coming back, and of course, memories are a huge part of literature and cinema, from "Stand by Me" to "Blade Runner."

The young remember most deeply.... When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly.

[M]emory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.

We all have appointments with the past.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had no childhood in it if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass . . .

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood. . . .