Quotes About Reminiscence

The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time

Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin. It is largely because of the books, films and reminiscences that have come between that the war of 1914-18 is now supposed to have had some tremendous, epic quality that the present one lacks.

What's the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They don't exist. Comping up for air! But there isn't any air. The dustbin that we're in reaches up to the stratosphere.

One thing, I thought as I drove down the hill, I'm finished with this notion of getting back into the past. What's the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They don't exist. Coming up for air! But there isn't any air. The dustbin that we're in reaches up to the stratosphere.

He had dragged out from the corners of his memory some more fragments of forgotten rhymes.

It is distance that creates nostalgia.

remember? That's why seeing us reminded her of her playhouse

I have a visceral response to a memory of working-class life.

When you have lived through something as magical as the 2014 World Cup final, you want to relive that experience as many times as possible.

Belgium's 1986 team is like the Christmas movie that they bring out every single year. That World Cup is something we get to see and hear about all the time. It is part of our general education in Belgium.

People don't realize what they had till it's gone. Like President Kennedy, there was no one like him, the Beatles, and my man Elvis Presley. I was the Elvis of boxing.

With 'Back to the Future', time-traveling lets you go back to a better, more comfortable life where your parents are happy and you have a lot of money - the capitalistic version of time travel.

I don't mourn the old, romantic, dirty Times Square, although it was more unique.

People get so tired of the '60s.

To be honest, I don't remember what happened in '95, '96 and '97. It was hard years. My memory is deleting.

I miss the guys. I don't get to see them often. We do get together in Houston now and then.

I like to visit with the exhausted girl who once was me

I hadn't remembered that in decades. That particular quiet.

The room looked exactly as it had looked when I left the Siddons house for good at the age of eighteen, as if the intervening years had never happened, as if my escape had been nothing but a dream.

She hears the word bell, or orchard, or swallow, and she experiences a strange surprise, like the feel of a coin in the soil. These words make her wistful; they overwhelm her with longing. Not for her orchard, nor the bell in her church, nor the swallows that nest in the eaves of her house. For something else altogether, something she would have forgotten completely. She wonders: Why should these words pierce me, if they are not the remains of a currency I once knew how to spend?

She wished for a moment that they were all children again. It still seemed extraordinary to her, that everything had turned out the way it had.

That she cried over the loss of a dog whose big claim to fame was that he could eat the crotch out of a pair of clean underpants in less than a minute?

When I finish something, I generally put it on the shelf, and I very seldom look at it unless somebody mentions it to me, and then I open the book, and I read it, and I say, "Did I do that?"

Yet all of his memories were fading like old photographs.