“The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names.”
Nostalgic feeling
Nostalgic Quotes — page 117 of 136
“There was a table laid with jellies and trifles, with a party hat beside each place, and a birthday cake with seven candles on it in the center of the table. The cake had a book drawn on it, in icing. My mother, who had organized the party, told me that the lady at the bakery said that they had never put a book on a birthday cake before, and that mostly for boys it was footballs or spaceships. I was their first book.”
“As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time.”
“If a scientist is not befuddled by what they're looking at, then they're not a research scientist.”
“The past is another planet.”
“I was born the same week NASA was founded, so we're the same age and feel some of the same pains, joys, and frustrations.”
“I'd go back and hang out with Isaac Newton. I'm torn between do I hang out with him or do I bring him into the present to hang out with me. See, that might be terrifying because his head will just explode once he sees everything that was derived from his discoveries, but I'd spend more time with someone who I think is one of the most brilliant minds our species has ever known.”
“My parents would frisk me before family events, and find the book, and lock it in the car. And then be disappointed where, somewhere at the event, I would find a book and sit under a table where nobody could get me and go back into book land.”
“I just got back from New York, and I realized in New York, it's very difficult to hear a New York accent. It's almost impossible, actually - everybody seems to speak like they're from the Valley or something. When I grew up, you could tell what street in Dublin someone's from by the way they talked.”
“Ireland is becoming like everywhere else, but that's the one I grew up in: the one that's hugely illogical. Rather wonderful, in a way. I never found this oppression of religion and that, but I did enjoy growing up in a culture that didn't need to be rational all of the time.”
“Old man take a look at my life, I'm a lot like you were.”
“The king is gone but he's not forgotten”
“If I could go back in time and see any band, It would be Link Wray and the Raymen.”
“Took out Skinny Minnie, Long Tall Sally, and Short Fat Fanny, but I'm kinda fonda Wanda.”
“When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation.”
“Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand.”
“The only possible paradises are those we have lost”
“That translucent alabaster of our memories.”
“The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.”
“The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.”