Idealized memories Quotes

There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side.

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

The past. The Golden Age of the past. What a nostalgia we all feel for it. Yet we don't want it when we get it. Try the South Seas.

But maybe every life looked wonderful if all you saw was the photo albums.

Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed.

Even if you find him. Even if he didn't leave you on purpose, he can't possibly live up to the person you've built him into." It's not like the thought hasn't occurred to me. I get that the chances of finding him are small, but the chances of finding him as I remember him are even smaller. But I just keep going back to what my dad always says, about how when you lose something, you have to visualize the last place you had it. And I found―and then lost―so many things in Paris.

He'd discovered that his memories of that summer were like bad movie montages - young lovers tossing a Frisbee in the park, sharing a melting ice-cream cone, bicycling along the river, laughing, talking, kissing, a sappy score drowning out the dialogue because the screenwriter had no idea what these two people might say to each other.

We attempt to remember our collective American childhood, the way it was, but what we often remember is a combination of real past, pieces reshaped by bitterness and love, and, of course, the video past--the portrayals of family life on such television programs as "Leave it to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best" and all the rest.

History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.

It's the worst part of seeing old friends: when your rose-colored memories become undone by reality.