Nostalgia Childhood Memories Quotes

This is what I want. I want people to take care of me. I want them to force comfort upon me. I want the soft-pillow feeling that I associate with memories of being ill when I was younger, soft pillows and fresh linens and satin-edged blankets and hot chocolate. It's not so much the comfort itself as knowing there's someone who wants to take care of you.

That night I looked up at those same stars, but I didn't want any of those things. I didn't want Egypt, or France, or far-flung destinations. I just wanted to go back to my life from my childhood, just to visit it, and touch it, and to convince myself that yes, it had been real.

But that’s nostalgia for you, the tyranny of those memories of childhood that feel so golden, so perfect.

For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up,’ there is always an edge of disbelief—how could they ever be other than what they are?

But I’ve been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I certainly don’t get soggy at the memory of some childhood knickknack; nor do I want to deceive myself sentimentally about something that wasn’t even true at the time—love of the old school, and so on. But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty.

Aching familiar in a way that made me wish I was still eight. Eight was before death or divorce or heartbreak. Eight was just eight. Hot dogs and peanut butter, mosquito bites and splinters, bikes and boogie boards. Tangled hair, sunburned shoulders, Judy Blume, in bed by nine thirty.

The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.

Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.

The child I was is just one breath away from me.

Nowhere on earth could possibly live up to those halcyon days. But that’s nostalgia for you, the tyranny of those memories of childhood that feel so golden, so perfect.

What no one tells the young is to be careful of their childhoods. The memories from those days are the most compelling paintings in the mind--to which, with nostalgia or dread, you must ever return.

Growing up, I always had a soldier mentality. As a kid I wanted to be a soldier, a fighter pilot, a covert agent, professions that require a great deal of bravery and risk and putting oneself in grave danger in order to complete the mission. Even though I did not become all those things, and unless my predisposition, in its youngest years, already had me leaning towards them, the interest that was there still shaped my philosophies. To this day I honor risk and sacrifice for the good of others - my views on life and love are heavily influenced by this.

As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.

Three children lay on the rocks at the water's edge. A dark-haired girl, two boys, slightly older. This image is caught forever in my memory, like some fragile creature preserved in amber.

অসংখ্য ঘটনা ঘটে একজন মানুষের জীবনে। আমিও তার ব্যতিক্রম নই। মাঝে মাঝে অলস দুপুরে বিছানায় শুনে আকাশের দিকে তাকিয়ে, কিংবা গভীর রাতে লিখতে বসে যখন কারেন্ট চলে যায় জানালার বাইরে তাকিয়ে ভাবতে থাকি আমার সেই শৈশব, সেই কৈশোরের সোনালী দিনগুলোর কথা। ছবির মত মনের পর্দায় খেলে উঠতে থাকে কত কথা, কত স্মৃতি। কোনটা হাসির কোনটা বেদনার। কখনো উদার হয়ে যায় মন, কখনো হাহাকার করে উঠে। বারবার মনে হয় এইতো সেদিনের কথা, হাত বাড়ালেই যেন ছোঁয়া যায়, কিন্তু তা আর যায় না! মনে হয় একটিবার, শুধু একটিবারের জন্য যদি সে সব দিনে ফিরে যেতে পারতাম!

I've been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I certainly don't get soggy at the memory of some childhood knickknack; nor do I want to deceive myself sentimentally about something that wasn't even true at the time - love of the old school, and so on. But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions - and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives - then I plead guilty.

Childhood doesn’t exist for children; however, for adults childhood is that former country we lost one day and which we futilely seek to recover by inhabiting it with diffuse or nonexistent memories, which in general are nothing but shadows of other dreams.

The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research “childhood.” There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises “adolescence.” The feeling haunts people all their lives. Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness.

It tugs at me, filling me with the kind of seasick nostalgia that can hit you in the gut when you find an old concert ticket in your purse or an old coin machine ring you got down at the boardwalk on a day when you went searching for mermaids in the surf with your best friend. That punch of nostalgia hits me now and I start to sink down on the sky-coloured quilt, feeling the nubby fabric under my fingers, familiar as the topography of my hand.

The uncertainty of the future made them turn their hearts toward the past. They saw themselves in the lost paradise of the deluge, splashing in the puddles in the courtyard, killing lizards to hang on Úrsula, pretending that they were going to bury her alive, and those memories revealed to them the truth that they had been happy together ever since they had had memory.

One can speak best through stories. Things only come alive in this way. This is because such things are the children of our experiences. They are conceived during big events in our lives, born when we begin to reflect on those incidents and then grow with us as our appreciation for the memories that brought them into being also lives and thrives.

I've been around the world now, but the alleys of my childhood will always be special. I carry the old stories and memories with me wherever I go.

A person in her twenties has been a child for most of her life, but as time goes by that portion that is childhood becomes smaller and smaller, more and more distant, more and more faded, though they say at the end of life the beginning returns with renewed vividness, as though you had sailed all the way around the world and were going back into the darkness from which you came.

A momentary feeling overcame her. It wasn't sadness exactly. But it wasn't just nostalgia, either. There was a golden drop of happiness in the feeling, whatever it was, as warming and delightful as sunlight. A memory of old dreams that had worn thin like the comfiest pillowcase one couldn't bear to throw out. Wonderland. The details had dimmed long ago but the feelings remained: adventure, magic, fascinating creatures.

We take it for granted that life moves forward. You build memories; you build momentum.You move as a rower moves: facing backwards. You can see where you've been, but not where you’re going. And your boat is steered by a younger version of you. It's hard not to wonder what life would be like facing the other way. Avenoir. You'd see your memories approaching for years, and watch as they slowly become real. You’d know which friendships will last, which days are important, and prepare for upcoming mistakes. You'd go to school, and learn to forget. One by one you'd patch things up with old friends, enjoying one last conversation before you meet and go your separate ways. And then your life would expand into epic drama. The colors would get sharper, the world would feel bigger. You'd become nothing other than yourself, reveling in your own weirdness. You'd fall out of old habits until you could picture yourself becoming almost anything. Your family would drift slowly together, finding each other again. You wouldn't have to wonder how much time you had left with people, or how their lives would turn out. You'd know from the start which week was the happiest you’ll ever be, so you could relive it again and again. You'd remember what home feels like, and decide to move there for good. You'd grow smaller as the years pass, as if trying to give away everything you had before leaving. You'd try everything one last time, until it all felt new again. And then the world would finally earn your trust, until you’d think nothing of jumping freely into things, into the arms of other people. You'd start to notice that each summer feels longer than the last. Until you reach the long coasting retirement of childhood. You'd become generous, and give everything back. Pretty soon you’d run out of things to give, things to say, things to see. By then you'll have found someone perfect; and she'll become your world. And you will have left this world just as you found it. Nothing left to remember, nothing left to regret, with your whole life laid out in front of you, and your whole life left behind.

Ah, happy hills, ah, pleasing shade, Ah, fields belov'd in vain, Where once my careless childhood stray'd, A stranger yet to pain! I feel the gales, that from ye blow, A momentary bliss bestow, As waving fresh their gladsome wing, My weary soul they seem to soothe, And, redolent of joy and youth, To breathe a second spring.

Nostalgia" How often we use this word reminiscing about the past - our childhood, school days, college days.. We feel nostalgic, we dwell in the memories of the past, we talk about how great those days were and how we would do anything to just go back in time and live those days again.. Perhaps we fail to realize the fact that tomorrow we will say the same things about today, about the days we are living in now, about the emotions we are feeling now, about the time we are spending now.. I love this day. I love this weird feeling I feel today. I belong here.

Your life is written in indelible ink. There's no going back to erase the past, tweak your mistakes, or fill in missed opportunities. When the moment's over, your fate is sealed. But if look closer, you notice the ink never really dries on any our experiences. They can change their meaning the longer you look at them. Klexos. There are ways of thinking about the past that aren't just nostalgia or regret. A kind of questioning that enriches an experience after the fact. To dwell on the past is to allow fresh context to trickle in over the years, and fill out the picture; to keep the memory alive, and not just as a caricature of itself. So you can look fairly at a painful experience, and call it by its name. Time is the most powerful force in the universe. It can turn a giant into someone utterly human, just trying to make their way through. Or tell you how you really felt about someone, even if you couldn't at the time. It can put your childhood dreams in context with adult burdens or turn a universal consensus into an embarrassing fad. It can expose cracks in a relationship that once seemed perfect. Or keep a friendship going by thoughts alone, even if you'll never see them again. It can flip your greatest shame into the source of your greatest power, or turn a jolt of pride into something petty, done for the wrong reasons, or make what felt like the end of the world look like a natural part of life. The past is still mostly a blank page, so we may be doomed to repeat it. But it's still worth looking into if it brings you closer to the truth. Maybe it's not so bad to dwell in the past, and muddle in the memories, to stem the simplification of time, and put some craft back into it. Maybe we should think of memory itself as an art form, in which the real work begins as soon as the paint hits the canvas. And remember that a work of art is never finished, only abandoned.

The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research “childhood.” There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises “adolescence.” The feeling haunts people all their lives. Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. The question becomes: What to do with the pieces? Some people hunker down atop the local pile of ruins and make do, Bedouin tending their goats in the shade of shattered giants. Others set about breaking what remains of the world into bits ever smaller and more jagged, kicking through the rubble like kids running through piles of leaves. And some people, passing among the scattered pieces of that great overturned jigsaw puzzle, start to pick up a piece here, a piece there, with a vague yet irresistible notion that perhaps something might be done about putting the thing back together again. Two difficulties with this latter scheme at once present themselves. First of all, we have only ever glimpsed, as if through half-closed lids, the picture on the lid of the jigsaw puzzle box. Second, no matter how diligent we have been about picking up pieces along the way, we will never have anywhere near enough of them to finish the job. The most we can hope to accomplish with our handful of salvaged bits—the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience—is to build a little world of our own. A scale model of that mysterious original, unbroken, half—remembered. Of course the worlds we build out of our store of fragments can be only approximations, partial and inaccurate. As representations of the vanished whole that haunts us, they must be accounted failures. And yet in that very failure, in their gaps and inaccuracies, they may yet be faithful maps, accurate scale models, of this beautiful and broken world. We call these scale models “works of art.

Nostalgia washes over me with tons of memors and lifetime rolled on this land. Every oblivious memory from the childhood wraps open in the fragrance of these busy roads and familiar land, long signals, irritating traffic,honking cars,rushing people,excessive pollution defining Delhi at its best.

This was both startling and comforting, and when the eye combined these separate things into a unity so strange, past all disjoining, one was curiously reminded of something, transposed into some mode that lay beyond convention far back in childhood, and the unsolved riddle was like a sign that had emerged from the sea of memory.

And he knew that he would never come again, and that lost magic would not come again. Lost now was all of it - the street, the heat, King's Highway, and Tom the Piper's son, all mixed in with the vast and drowsy murmur of the Fair, and with the sense of absence in the afternoon, and the house that waited, and the child that dreamed.

The road goes west out of the village, past open pine woods and gallberry flats. An eagle's nest is a ragged cluster of sticks in a tall tree, and one of the eagles is usually black and silver against the sky. The other perches near the nest, hunched and proud, like a griffon. There is no magic here except the eagles. Yet the four miles to the Creek are stirring, like the bleak, portentous beginning of a good tale. The road curves sharply, the vegetation thickens, and around the bend masses into dense hammock. The hammock breaks, is pushed back on either side of the road, and set down in its brooding heart is the orange grove. Any grove or any wood is a fine thing to see. But the magic here, strangely, is not apparent from the road. It is necessary to leave the impersonal highway, to step inside the rusty gate and close it behind. By this, an act of faith is committed, through which one accepts blindly the communion cup of beauty. One is now inside the grove, out of one world and in the mysterious heart of another. Enchantment lies in different things for each of us. For me, it is in this: to step out of the bright sunlight into the shade of orange trees; to walk under the arched canopy of their jadelike leaves; to see the long aisles of lichened trunks stretch ahead in a geometric rhythm; to feel the mystery of a seclusion that yet has shafts of light striking through it. This is the essence of an ancient and secret magic. It goes back, perhaps, to the fairy tales of childhood, to Hansel and Gretel, to Babes in the Wood, to Alice in Wonderland, to all half-luminous places that pleased the imagination as a child. It may go back still farther, to racial Druid memories, to an atavistic sense of safety and delight in an open forest. And after long years of spiritual homelessness, of nostalgia, here is that mystic loveliness of childhood again. Here is home. An old thread, long tangled, comes straight again.

There is no scent of nostalgia like a fragrance drawn from the garden of childhood memories.

There is no scent of nostalgia like a fragrance drawn from the garden of childhood memories.

God! what would I forfeit to have the days of my childhood restored, or to be able to forget them for ever!

Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

Siblings are a volume of childhood memories; a nostalgia that cannot be easily deleted.

When I first began to write, I had been a child for most of my life, and my childhood memories were vivid and potent, and the forces that shaped me, Most of them have grown fainter with time, and whenever I write one down, I give it away: it ceases to have the shadowy life of memory and becomes fixed in letters: it ceases to be mine; it loses that mobile unreliability of the live.

With the approach of age the soul flies like a bird back to the days of childhood. Now those days shine bright and clear in my memory until it seems as if everything then must have been better, lovelier than in the world of today. In this rich and poor do not differ, for there is surely none so destitute but his childhood shows some glint of happiness when he remembers it in age.

Not very long ago I was driving with my husband on the back roads of Grey County, which is to the north and east of Huron County. We passed a country store standing empty at a crossroads. It had old-fashioned store windows, with long narrow panes. Out in front there was a stand for gas pumps which weren't there anymore. Close beside it was a mound of sumac trees and strangling vines, into which all kinds of junk had been thrown. The sumacs jogged my memory and I looked back at the store. It seemed to me that I had been here once, and the the scene was connected with some disappointment or dismay. I knew that I had never driven this way before in my adult life and I did not think I could have come here as a child. It was too far from home. Most of our drives out of town where to my grandparents'house in Blyth--they had retired there after they sold the farm. And once a summer we drove to the lake at Goderich. But even as I was saying this to my husband I remembered the disappointment. Ice cream. Then I remembered everything--the trip my father and I had made to Muskoka in 1941, when my mother was already there, selling furs at the Pine Tree Hotel north of Gravehurst.

His home town as it existed in his memory seemed distant to him, like something that belonged to another person. It was almost as though he'd mistaken a place he'd seen on TV or in a film for a thing of his own, or else that the sights seen by someone in one of the thousand or so different flats on that estate had somehow snuck their way into his mind and still remained there. That was how it seemed from time to time.

I should have felt something—a pang of sadness, a twinge of nostalgia. I did feel a peculiar sensation, like oceanic despair that—if I were in a movie—would be depicted superficially as me shaking my head slowly and shedding a tear. Zoom in on my sad, pretty, orphan face. Smash cut to a montage of my life's most meaningful moments: my first steps; Dad pushing me on a swing at sunset; Mom bathing me in the tub; grainy, swirling home video of my sixth birthday in the backyard garden, me blindfolded and twirling to pin the tail on the donkey. But the nostalgia didn't hit. These weren't my memories. I just felt a tingling in my hands, an eerie tingle, like when you nearly drop something precious off a balcony, but don't. My heart bumped up a little. I could drop it, I told myself—the house, this feeling. I had nothing left to lose.

That first day at school, maybe an agonising parting from your parents. The face of a loved one lost. A pullover knitted by your granny. A favourite toy. A doll, perhaps. A book of rhymes, tattered and torn. Someone who gave you a flower, a kiss on the forehead. To the end of your days you will carry that kiss with you. And may it protect you from all harm.

When looking back on our lives, it is difficult objectively to evaluate our actions. When retelling our story, it is challenging to achieve balanced journalism. It is understandable why we might be inclined to overemphasize nostalgic feelings of happiness, glamorize stretches of childhood or other periods where life was rather uncomplicated, while assigning a disproportionate amount of anxiety to rougher periods of life. When we create strong, joyous memories, we preserve cherished feelings in the present. By assigning selective pleasant memories to the past, we create a homey place where we can return to visit. Fondness for nostalgic memories provides a buffer from existential threat, improves mood, combats loneliness, increases social consecutiveness, and enhances self-regard.

A lifetime of memories does not provide empirical proof of the value of living. No one memory has a quantifiable value to anyone expect the holder of the memory. Parenting in large part consists of creating positive memories for children. An accumulation of a lifetime of memories does create a musical score that we can assess from an artistic if not scientific perspective. Each happy memory generates a beat of minor joy that when strung together form the musical notes demarking a person’s prosodic inner tune.

Yeah, just what I needed, a massive three-day Hostess binge, followed by a week of trying to replicate recipes so that if no one decides to buy and reissue Twinkies and Suzy Q's, I'll be all set. It was a ridiculous endeavor, since most of the experience of Hostess is in the slightly plasticky tastes and textures, which cannot be replicated in a home kitchen. You can make a delicious moist yellow cake and fill it with a marshmallowy vanilla cream, and it will be spectacular, trust me; I ate at least a dozen. But it won't taste like a Twinkie. The cake won't have the springiness, the filling won't have the fluff, and it is impossible to get those three little dots in the bottom. Which would be fine, since I hadn't actually eaten a Hostess product for the better part of a decade, hadn't missed them either. But that little news item hit, and in a Pavlovian fit of nostalgia, I was off to the local gas station to load up on white boxes with blue and red details. Twinkies, Sno Balls, Ding Dongs... even a cherry Fruit Pie. All of them the flavors of my youth, and proof that there are certain things you should leave as fond memories, since they don't really hold up.

The mental Images were liquifying So I could no longer separate what I was recalling from the past from what I'd seen in detailed photos that afternoon. Like life. I've long suspected that many of my memories from childhood Are actually drawn from old pictures, That they are composed of snapshots, A mosaic of celluloids Images reworked into a remembered reality. Kodak cast backwards. Maybe it's better to recall The pass that way. We rarely take pictures of sad occasions.

The more I try to remember, the more the memory recedes from me, like darkness running from the light as the earth turns on its axis.

I grew up thinking it was normal to play in ghost towns.

It was like going back to a childhood home after decades away. You knew it intimately and saw past the changes time had wrought, the nostalgia seeping into you as forgotten memories sprang up, but it wasn’t quite right. It didn’t belong to you anymore, and you were left torn by the desire that things be as they once were, and the realization that the present was as it should be.

Nostalgia clung to the wooden walls as bright as their glossy finish. Childhood memories held an entirely different feeling than my memories as a teen — they felt softer, richer, like streaks of acrylic paint across a canvas.

As the childhood days became faint, sweet memories, I found myself longing for them.

devouring their dark lips, dark with wine and fleeting love, an ancient memory love had promised but finally never gave, until there were too many kisses to count or remember, and the memory of love proved not love at all and needed a replacement, which our bodies found, and then the giggles subsided, and the laughter dimmed, and darkness enfolded all of us and we gave away our childhood for nothing and we died

The sun had disappeared behind the hill and the sky had faded to violet hues. This once common sight of my childhood had now become a simple reminder to me. A reminder of the past. What I could have done, what I should’ve done and what I could’ve been. I often wondered if I was wrong to honour the memory of the days that had slipped on by. After all, the body of today had fallen, but it was still breathing. Was I wrong to mourn something still alive?

Why could this darkness rip the gloominess around me Had an unknown reason of being fearful for so long Thinking, if its touched by these horrendous winds Will unleash my sorrowful side & my mood swings! Aesthetically pleasing it is now, Couldn't yearn for it to be any better This oasis of serenity though, I trust will cast away all my darkness & dust!

Sometimes, It's awesome to be childish with your partner .Otherwise you are missing out.

But therein lies all the beauty of childhood: it exists to be betrayed, and that betrayal is the birth of nostalgia, the only sentiment that allows us, one day perhaps, at the other end of life, to rediscover the pureness of youth.

It is rare to experience an elementary emotion in isolation, like “pure rage.” Most feelings are composites. Take saudade,7 from the Portuguese word for longing for something irreversibly lost, like the forsaken comfort of a childhood home, suffused with a warm glow and fond memories (the paradigmatic et in arcadia ego). Portugal has an entire music genre known as fado that epitomizes saudade; it combines sadness, longing, regret, nostalgia, anxiety, and dread.

The world of Mark Twain seems so very far away from us. Today that half-wild innocent America of his childhood memories is a lost continent, sunk forever under those arid deserts of asphalt, those oceans of poison sludge, those mountains of technological garbage which are the monuments of the human dilemma we like to call progress. It’s nice though to catch a glimpse of things as they used to be... a landscape painted in words to bring us back for a moment, to that early morning of the American day so blithe and free when we were still on speaking terms with Mother Earth.

I was overcome by such a deep feeling of Sehnsucht while watching Puff the Magic Dragon that I felt like crying, but of course, I was a boy and boys don't cry.

He wished he could go back. But unfortunately, he knew it to be an impossibility—that time could only travel forward and the simplicity of his childhood would remain lost to the past.

Those fields of childhood, tall Meadow-grass and flowers small, The elm whose dusky leaves Patterned the sky with dreams innumerable And labyrinthine vein and vine And wandering tendrils green, Have grown a seed so small A single thought contains them all

Fernand Khnopff was a private, reserved man dedicated to his art and the intellectual pursuit of the ideal. Uneasy in the modern materialistic world, he shared in the symbolist nostalgia for the Middle Ages, a dream world embodied for him by his childhood memories of Bruges. All who knew him admired his intellect, his great culture and learning, and his solid friendship, but in the end he found himself isolated from those around him. Khnopff identified with Hamlet, another melancholy dreamer forced into a world of action.

For though I don't believe in ghosts, I am haunted by lilacs. [excerpted from 'Lilacs']

I've asked you so many Golub words over the years." She looked up at him. Her eyes glistened. "But what's the Golub word for 'love'?" "Love," he repeated. "Th-there's more than one word for love. There's friendship love---silan. Gratitude love---baya. Nostalgic love---ruman. There's... there are forty words for love." "What if, hypothetically, you feel all those ways about someone?" "Hypothetically?" "No." She held his gaze. "Actually not hypothetically at all." Looking into her eyes, Raf found himself unable to speak. "I... I started working on that mural randomly. I didn't even plan it out properly. What did it matter? Not like anyone's given a crap about that mural since the storm came through. And what did I end up creating? The dolphins we swam with," she said. "The sandcastles we made together. Everything on there... Do you see it, Raf?" There was Main Street---the movie theater. Tilted Tales, where they sat for hours on end reading comics. The entire street was there, but it was both of these locations that shone with a sheen of glitter. He took it all in. "It's us," he said slowly. "You painted our places. Our favorite memories." "I love you, Raf." Her voice quivered. "Silan---the friendship one. Baya, the gratitude one. Ruman. Nostalgia for what we were. All of it. I love you in all the ways I know.

We hold the places of our youth unchanged in our minds and stay secretly young that way.

Most people are conscious of the fact that in looking back upon their past lives, especially upon the days of their childhood, it is the sunshine that abides with them and not the shadow. In all the memories, let us say of a garden in which we played as children, the says are hot and bright, the flowers always blooming. So it is with Oxford. Heaven knows the place is often enough shrouded in cold, wet mist: for weeks together the streets are muddy beyond all other streets: at the beginning of each term (save that one by courtesy called "summer") the chemists' shops are (or used to be) filled with rows of bottles of quinine, to enable the poor undergraduate to struggle against a depressing climate. But who remembers all these things in after years? The man of fifty hears Oxford mentioned, and there comes back to him at once a place where old grey buildings throw shadows across shaven lawns; where the young green of the chestnut makes a brilliant splash of colour above the college garden wall; where cool bright waters wind beneath ancient willows, and it is good to bask in flannels in a punt. In fact it is the few days of real summer—the two or three in each "summer" term—that he remembers in accordance with memory's happy scheme, in which it is the fittest that survive.

I remembered the last time Emily and I had tried looking ourselves up as a joke. Her top result had been some sort of beauty blogger on YouTube and mine had been a porn star. We had laughed ourselves silly over it. Now, when I looked up my name, the first page of results was actually all me.

Lennon was – whether by luck, accident or perceptive foresight – at the forefront of the psychedelic era’s passion for rose-tinted introspection, which channelled the likes of children’s literature, Victorian fairgrounds and circuses, and an innocent sense of wonder. McCartney, too, moved with the times when writing his children’s singalong Yellow Submarine. Among the hippie era’s other moments of nostalgia were Pink Floyd’s Bike and The Gnome from their debut album Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, recorded at EMI Studios as the Beatles worked on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit, laid down in 1966 but released in the same month as Sgt Pepper, and which drew from Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories just as Lennon did; and many more, from Tiny Tim’s Tiptoe Through The Tulips to Traffic’s psychedelic fantasy Hole In My Shoe. The Beatles continued writing songs evoking childhood to the end of their days. Sgt Pepper – itself a loose concept album harking back to earlier, more innocent times – referenced Lewis Carroll (Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds), youthful anticipation of old age (When I’m Sixty-Four), a stroll down memory lane (Good Morning Good Morning), and the sensory barrage of a circus big top extravaganza (Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!). It was followed by Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine, two films firmly pitched at the widest possible audience. A splendid time was, indeed, guaranteed for all.

No kind of writing lodges itself so deeply in our memory, echoing there for the rest of our lives, as the books that we met in our childhood.

The landscape of one's childhood was more vibrant than any other. It didn't matter where it was or what it looked like, the sights and sounds imprinted differently from those encountered later. They became part of a person, inescapable.

Memories with people are weird things because oftentimes, you’re the only one who still has them.

The greatest memories a person might have in their life is, childhood. It's really a painful nostalgia.

She thought about how her biggest wish as a child was to grow up. But growing up hurt like hell in a world that actively preyed on innocence and demanded conformity. Now that she was a jaded adult, she would give anything to be a wild kid again.