Lukas Foss Quotes

I wrote my first book without being to Ethiopia since I was two years old.

In the Second World War, I was a little girl. I was evacuated in my country.

Our family arrived in England in 1960. At that time I thought the war was ancient history. But if I think of 15 years ago from now, that's 1990, and that seems like yesterday to me.

I was born in a small suburb of Ilford in a rather nasty housing estate that my mother despised. She had grown up in the country, so when the war came and I was evacuated to Wales she thought I was much better off there.

I grew up during the Revolution of Iran and the war between Iran and Iraq. The things that I saw. The impact. How it changes you. How it changes the way you look at the world.

I think because I'm not a parent, my most immediate connection to childhood is my memory of my own childhood.

There is a lot of my childhood in 'The Sandcastle Girls.'

Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars.

It's hard to remember my childhood without remembering music.

When I was a little boy in Tijuana, it was wonderland. We left when I was probably four - I was dying of tuberculosis.

I don't really remember a lot of my childhood.

How do you know, Dan? You were so young when they died. Do you really remember them?" "Not in my mind," Dan replied, gazing at the passing scenery. "But everyplace else.

I would say Pittsburgh softly each time before throwing him up. Whisper Pittsburgh with my mouth against the tiny ear and throw him higher. Pittsburgh and happiness high up. The only way to leave even the smallest trace. So that all his life her son would feel gladness unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined city of steel in America. Each time almost remembering something maybe important that got lost.

I think some people are just very passionate that things remain the way they were when they were kids.

There is nothing fine about being a child: it is fine, when we are old, to look back to when we were children.

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you're so wrecked it's hard to believe you ever were a child?

Childhood feels so permanent, like it's the entire world, and then one day it's over and you're shoveling wet dirt onto your father's coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.

I half closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy, and he'd wave, and maybe even call.

I'm eighty-three and homeless. It was the same when World War II ended. The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people's discharges and stuff. And my feeling was "Please, I've done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?" That what I feel right now. I've written books. Lots of them. Please, I've done everything I'm supposed to do. Can I go home now? I've wondered where home is. It's when I was in Indianapolis when I was nine years old. Had a dog, a cat, a brother, a sister.

The stories we hear in our childhood are the ones we remember all our lives.

The smells of Christmas are the smells of childhood [p. 53]

The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived.

I think the world that I grew up in was like being in this sort of magical artistic garden.

I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It's a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That's why I want to write a book.