George Ball Quotes

The past always looks better than it was. It’s only pleasant because it isn’t here.

We romanticize the past with an illusion that we'd know how we'd fit.

Sometimes people who had been together for a long time got to imagining that things used to be better, even when they weren't.

It's funny what memory does, isn't it? My favorite holiday tradition might not have happened more than once or twice. But because it is such a good memory, so encapsulating of everything I love about the holidays, in my mind it happened every year. Without fail.

That kind of creaming off the pretty postcard image of the past, I think, is a road to nowhere.

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

Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.

A lot of people do that kind of nostalgia stuff believing that they were very happy in their teenage years, but that's probably just an illusion.

I don't do nostalgia. The phrase 'the good old days' never passes my lips.

Nostalgia often leads to idle speculation.

I've seldom become nostalgic or settled.

I am not a nostalgic person.

Nostalgia is a very human trait.

The great times were never as great as they seem in the rearview mirror.

Nostalgia could be considered a disease because you're living now.

That was part of her, and you used to know it. It's like now you only care about the Alaska you made up.

I find that the further I go back, the better things were, whether they happened or not.

Do you remember the time darlin' when everything made more sense in the world? Oh I remember, I remember... when life made more sense... Take me back, take me back, take me way back... to when life made more sense.

The scenes and events of long ago, and the persons who took part in them, wear a charming aspect to the eye of memory, which sees only the outlines and takes no note of disagreeable details. The present enjoys no such advantage, and so it always seems defective.

We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness.

There's a sort of romanticizing of the past. When you actually think about the past, you know it's a little different.

There is no illusion so permanent as that which enables us to look backward with complacency; there is no mental process so deceptive as the comparing of recollections with realities.

The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened.

In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.

Really, each era has its own false nostalgia. We all put a picket fence up around something. For my generation it was the '50s, and for other generations it will be something else.