Gary Ross Quotes

Nostalgia is a seductive liar.

All the proliferating falsifications of what I and everyone I know experienced once in what it is now so convenient to call the "fifties" or "sixties," as if life was really measured or lived in arbitrary decades, when the history books are sold like comix.

I think people are always nostalgic for a time about 20 years before they were born.

Why does the past seem so magical, so fraught, so luminous? At the time it was just, ugh, another boring bloody day. But, to look back on, it's a day full of miracles and light and extraordinary events. Why is this? What process do we apply to the past, to give it this vividness? I don't know.

If anyone looks back to the '70s, '80s with nostalgic rosy colored glasses and goes, 'Well, everything was awesome.' No, everything was not awesome!

I think whatever generation you're in has a nostalgia for the generations past and the generations you weren't in.

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

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

The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact a return to the idealized past.

Film has changed the way we look at the past.

Anytime a movie or television show retreats into certain American pasts, I'm both annoyed and relieved.

An underexplored reason why nostalgic art is worthwhile is that it influences the way the past is remembered.

There is a recurring temptation for any nation, and for any writer who operates within its field of force, to make an ornament of the past: to turn the losses to victories and to restate humiliations as triumphs.

I look at [Toronto] and think well, perhaps my grandchildren will someday look at this stuff with the sort of appreciation I once held for Art Deco. Although I've come to find Art Deco quite creepy too.

Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed.

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.

Few cultures have not produced the idea that in some past era the world ran better than it does now.

I find that anything culturally significant that happened before '93 I associate with the decade before it. In fact, Oregon Trail is one of a handful of signposts that middle school existed at all.

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.

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

I don't know who Peter Lorre is. Pathetic, right? It shows you how completely gross and uncultured my generation is.

I don't get all this Speedo stuff actually, I mean, whatever happened to the feather boa?

It is a curious fact that in bad days we can very vividly recall the good time that is now no more; but that in good days, we have only a very cold and imperfect memory of the bad.

I had so many adults around me reminding me that I was a kid. I also had a lot of adults saying things to me like, "When I was your age..." and sort of idealizing it. I didn't like that they idealized it.

Notice, for example, that people who talk about "the joys of childhood" are always adults. Only an adult, utterly remote from the reality of childhood, could suppose it is time of joys.