Christa McAuliffe Quotes

I can barely remember what I was like 36 years ago when I was 21 years old.

So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination to look back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, grows upon most of us.

I'll admit, when I look back on the past couple decades, a lot of it seems like a blur.

I was worried that one day, 40 years from now, I would look back and wouldn't be able to remember the details of my life, so I've written them all down.

I'm in a position to look back at my life, and I realized there were a number of experiences that needed to be documented.

You get to a point in your life where you go, 'I don't remember what I did.'

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

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

You know, let a few years go by until I hit my midlife crisis. Then that can be documented on film.

One good reason for writing novels based on your life is that you have something to read in old age when you've forgotten what happened.

You know it's only 50 miles from Grand River to Canton, but it took me 67 years to travel that distance.

The great disadvantage of getting older is to be obliged to relive the salient economic events of one's youth, with nothing learned and nothing forgotten.

My impression is that the elimination of memories greatly reduces the value of the experience.

At the end of each year, I sit on the floor and go page by page through the old calendar, inking annual events into the new one, all the while watching my year in 'dinner withs' skate by. When I'm done, I save the old calendar in the box of the new one and put it with the others on a shelf.

When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past... And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.

I'm sure once my career's over, when I look back when I'm older, I can maybe appreciate it a little bit more.

At 86, I can easily look back to the last eight decades. Though memory often fails me now, so many images of the past are still clearly polished, and I can yet recall not just an abiding sense of place, but the keen smells, the sensory responses to the events of that past.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

So if it seems that some of what I'll have to say in the pages to come doesn't reflect the mellowing of age, that's only because I've never found that life and memories respond to time the way that tobacco does.

How confusing the beams from memory's lamp are; One day a bachelor, the next a grampa. What is the secret of the trick? How did I get so old so quick?

Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case," in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.

Old man take a look at my life, I'm a lot like you were.

The older you get the more you live in the past

The older we get, the swifter time seems to pass and the quicker memories seem to fade.

It's been fascinating watching all those pictures of me with a lot more hair Jeremy, and looking very young. And we've all got things we've said, twenty, thirty years ago, indeed the whole world has changed since then.