Emily Maitlis Quotes

Childhood is less clear to me than to many people: when it ended I turned my face away from it for no reason that I know about, certainly without the usual reason of unhappy memories. For many years that worried me, but then I discovered that the tales of former children are seldom to be trusted. Some people supply too many past victories or pleasures with which to comfort themselves, and other people cling to pains, real and imagined, to excuse what they have become.

My family settled in Cairo in 1980. I was nine. I missed Libya terribly, but I also took to Cairo. I perfected the accent. People assumed I was Egyptian.

I had relatives who would go to Japan and bring back random stuff they bought at the airport or whatever - 'Ultraman' and 'Speed Racer,' stuff like that.

Miyazaki movies were what I was raised on. I've watched them since I was very young, and I've been greatly shaped by them.

I'm a historian. I really like the past. But most people seem far more interested in what you can tell them about the future.

Oh, talking about private school, man, I had cornrows, and when I picked 'em out, certain people that didn't look like me always wanted to touch 'em. One time, I just said, 'Yo, hell no.'

I was born at Rotten Row in Glasgow and brought up in Loch Lomond near a small place called Gartocharn. And it's a bit like anyone: where you're brought up, you have an irresistible attraction to that place; it defines who you are.

No matter where I've been or where I go, a piece of Missouri is always with me because this is where I'm from and where I grew up.

I've shied away from playing Asian characters. if you look back, I'm playing characters that have no relevance to my ethnicity.

What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods?

One doesn't know if one had a happy childhood or not. I don't really know what it means.

Why I talked about political correctness: the colonial is now such a major taboo that any achievement of the colonial period, or any generosity implied in colonialism, is again fundamentally neglected or fundamentally not recognised. That's crazy, because history is a series of layers, and you cannot say, "This layer I support and this layer I cancel." History is history and you cannot retrospectively manipulate it.

I don't like coming home. It keeps me from being nostalgic, which by nature I am. Even before the plane begins its descent, I find myself dreading the questions left unanswered by my childhood.

When I'm standing in the middle of the salt flats, where you swear that the pupils of your eyes have turned white because of the searing heat that is rising from the desert, I think of my childhood, I think of my mother, my father, my grandparents; I think of the history that we hold there and it is beautiful to me. But it is both a blessing and a burden to be rooted in place. It's recognizing the pattern of things, almost feeling a place before you even see it. In Southern Utah, on the Colorado plateau where canyon walls rise upward like praying hands, that is a holy place to me.

Do you think we care about the feelings of Native Americans when we celebrate Columbus Day? That's the day that the white man discovered a land where Indians had been living for a few thousand years.

What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so that's what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so they'd really sink in, so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the paint and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his.

what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

The past is another planet.

India is still flinching from a cultural insult, still looking for its identity.

What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

I don't think anyone ever remembers what they were really like as kids. Adults think they do, but they don't. Photos and videos don't capture the real you, or bring back to life the person you used to be. You have to return to the past to do that.

What I've learned about that word is context, where the world is coming from - in the era the film is set, it obviously is used derogatorily. In 'Selma,' it was the same sort of thing. Of course now, in music, it's used in many more ways, including ways that takes the sting out of it. It all depends on where and when it is used, and how you look at it. But again in 'Race,' it is intensely disrespectful.

I came in 11 years ago. I remember it like it was tomorrow

I think some people are really connected to who they were as children. And some people aren't.

I read a lot, and I watch a lot of TV and film now. That's my homework. Like I said, my Netflix. I've watched Aliens a couple times this week, Dawn Of The Dead. And that's what's really cool too. It's nostalgia, because I saw these shows, these movies, a lot of them, when I was a kid, and they're different now when you watch them. I'm like, "Wow, I can't believe my family let me watch that," and "I must have missed that the first time around."