nostalgic recollections Quotes

I'm surprised by how much I remember [on childhood on film]. I think it's just because I had these interesting moments. Of course, you never know when they're interesting moments, but there was a lot of stuff that I remember and have attached significance to later. I remember enough. I remember highlights.

The young remember most deeply.... When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly.

Pictures can live in one's memory. That's why they are important.

The most valuable things in a life are a man's memories. And they are priceless.

Memories are who we are. In the end, that's all the luggage you take with you. Love and Memories are what last.

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.

No one can remember himself as an unpleasant child.

If there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers.

Christmas, in fact, is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart: like a nursery story, its validity rests on exact repetition, so that it comes around every time as the evocation of one's whole life and particularly of the most distant bits of it in childhood.

Be a storehouse of happy memories.

It's sad that children cannot know their parents when they were younger; when they were loving, courting, and being nice to one another. By the time children are old enough to observe, the romance has all too often faded or gone underground.

The Columbia years are the most sentimental for me. My parents were together through most of that time and we were a happy, sort of normal family.

Our memories, they can be inviting. But some are altogether, mighty frightening.

Mothers remember a child's first words, and quote them in tones usually reserved for Byron.

Now that Mr. Carter has made a book of his diary, an adoring memoir entitled Keeping Faith, the notes read like a collection of letters sent from scout camp.

... a country encapsulates our childhood and those lanes, byres, fields, flowers, insects, suns, moons and stars are forever reoccurring.

Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.

The memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light. The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness.

How do you regret one of the best nights of your entire life? You don't. You remember every word, every look. Even when it hurts, you still remember.

All right. Let's give you something to tell your grandkids about. Or great-grandkids. Or great-great-grandkids." I snort with glee, delirious with excitement. Charlie winks and pours me another finger's worth of whiskey. Then, on second thought, he tips the bottle again. I reach out and grab its neck. "Better not," I say. "Don't want to get tipsy and break a hip.

Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines.

Forget about writing to Penthouse. This one was going to be a story for their grandkids.

A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction.

Dreams, memories, the sacred--they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.

Looking back over my life so far I am able to remember specific days that were perfect. These tend to be days, and parts of days, in which nothing in particular happened, except that I was utterly happy.