Thomas Noon Talfourd Quotes

People change with time. There are things that happened to a person in his childhood and years later they seem to him alien and strange. I am trying to decipher that child. Sometimes he is a stranger to me. When you think about when you were 14, don't you feel a certain alienation?

We are who we're going to be when we're very old, and when we're very old we are who we were when we were 8.

A certain point came when I wanted to document growing-up adventures.

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. . . .

Aledo will always be home to me because I spent the first 27 years of my life there - it's such a special place - and because of the experiences I had there, I've become the person I am today.

Then again, I think about high school every day and I think about being a little kid every day too.

We all have those dreams of going back in time and seeing what it was like when our parents were younger.

That song didn't just happen. It grew out of my experiences. 'American Pie' was part of my process of self-awakening: a mystical trip into my past.

To return to the books of my childhood is to yield to the strain of nostalgia that is curious about the self I once was.

As I look back over my life, I've been an active person - obviously I was self-absorbed for a period of time.

Sitting on the floor, I'd replay the past in my head. Funny, that's all I did, day after day after day for half a year, and I never tired of it. What I'd been through seemed so vast, with so many facets. Vast, but real, very real, which was why the experience persisted in towering before me, like a monument lit up at night. And the thing was, it was a monument to me.

I was processing a lot of different things and kind of looking over a lot of things and rethinking my childhood.

I look at the past and I see myself.

These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past

It's very odd, being older, because in a way it's hard to own the past, even.

You're always looking at last year, or 10 years ago, or your school days, or your teenage years, your formative years. Because that's exactly what they are, they're your formative years.

You can almost measure where you are in life by the degree to which you have begun looking back rather than ahead.

I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: 'You can't rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East. There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.'

I became an adult in an extreme way. I was recently sorting some old photographs and I found another.

I was 20 years old and felt I had a lot to offer, even to myself.

That's a part of me going back to what I used to do.

You realize yourself when you start reflecting - because I don't live in the past, although your past is so much a part of what you are - that you can't ignore it. But I don't look at scrapbooks.

A lot of times, when I go back to books I loved when I was young, I don't quite understand what it was that I loved about them. Rereading 'The Secret Garden,' I felt a lot like Mary feels when she visits her garden.

I think it's natural as you get to the end of your twenties to start thinking about what you could have done differently - whether they went well or whether they went terribly.

When you finally go back to your old home, you find it wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood.