historical reminiscence Quotes

When I began to interview people from the '60s, my first question was always, 'What was your favorite record?'

To go again over the history of the struggle of resistance ... and to think 'Where are all these people today Where is the KGB' is very inspiring

One day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

As we grow older we think more and more of old persons and of old things and places. As to old persons, it seems as if we never know how much they have to tell until we are old ourselves and they have been gone twenty or thirty years. Once in a while we come upon some survivor of his or her generation that we have overlooked, and feel as if we had recovered one of the lost books of Livy or fished up the golden candlestick from the ooze of the Tiber.

I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago, and of people who will see a world that I shall never know.

It was a strange combination to absorb - the everyday concerns of the town doctor stuck in the middle of a discussion of his early days in seventeenth-century London.

I thought of the future, and spoke of the past.

Harlem exists in retrospect, in the memory of grandparents or elderly cousins, those 'old-timers' ever ready with their geysers of remembered scenes. The legends of 'Black Mecca' are preserved in the glossy musicals of Times Square and in texts of virtually every kind.

These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.

Time was when people used to brag about how old they were - and I am old enough to remember it.