Reconnecting with the Past Quotes

I love creating that community and writing about that place, because I think, in some ways, Bois Sauvage is like the DeLisle of my past; it's like the DeLisle of the '80s that I can never return to. So in some ways, when I write about Bois Sauvage, I'm writing about a home that I've lost.

Life…we understand it differently at different stages. It’s what is interesting about getting older, you realize your relationship with the past is always negotiable. There is a lot of freedom in that, because you realize you can go back to what you did such a long time ago. You can talk with the dead, talk with your lost self, your disappeared self, and you can visit those places again, and understand it differently. That makes a huge difference.

When memories fade, can one ever really return home?

Going back after a long time will make you made, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.

If I come back to you now, can we be what we were before life’s uncertain rhythms tore us so far apart? If I return today, will your arms gather me in, or will I be wrenched away, snatched by riptide I have no power to resist? If I find my way to you, one man standing in a crowd, will I even know who you are?

Reunions are always fraught with awkward tensions - the necessity to account for oneself; the attempt to find, through memories, an ember of the old emotions.

When you finally go back to your old home, you find it wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood.

It's so interesting that the romantic side of my life comes from my father, who I really didn't even know that well.

It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.

It is only by making the past alive again for a person that a true growth in the present is facilitated. If the past is cut off, the future does not exist.

If I had to return to Valencia, I would not rule that out.

There were exceptions, a couple of families that just plain didn't want to even think about it, although forty years had passed but mostly the people were very interested in talking about it.

I re-read a lot of my college writing while we were in rehearsals, and it was so strange. It was wonderful to go back and revisit that part of my life. It did kind of make me hungry for it again.

The hardest stories we tell are always about ourselves. How do you explain that you have been missing your mother for 20 years? I don't know how to explain that to you. I wasn't even sure I wanted to film that, because I don't know how I felt about it. I didn't want to put her through it, and I frankly wasn't ready. Because since I was 16, I just had created my own life for myself, you know? I left when I was 12. I'm 32. And I have gotten to know my mother more through editing her and looking and watching and editing her footage, you know.

A good antidote to nostalgia is to go home, and then you remember why you left.

I have stayed true to that first idea that people can have a day in their lives that is very important and if they can reconnect with that day, reconnect with the people they were then, they can suddenly revive their emotions.

He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.

Just the very thought of someone my age going to visit old girlfriends had instant appeal.Even women think, 'That would be interesting.' Not comfortable, but interesting. It is not a comfortable film at any point.

Another part of the challenge was to bring back things that you've forgotten about and maybe some things you haven't forgotten about, recontextualize them and have the series make sense.

We can heal. Perhaps we can return to that same place we once stood, when we were both young and innocent.