rosy retrospection Quotes

We remember childhood as the fabulous years of our lives, and nations remember their childhood as fabulous years.

That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.

I suppose we all tend to remember only the happiness from our childhood, as a sundial refuses to tell the time except in fine weather.

There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side.

But maybe every life looked wonderful if all you saw was the photo albums.

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed.

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.

The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future.

We have the bad habit, some of us, of looking back to a time - almost any time will do - when society was stable and orderly, family ties stronger and deeper, love more lasting and faithful, and so on. Let me be your Cassandra prophesying after the fact, and a long study of the documents in the case: it was never true, that is, no truer than it is now.

We over-exaggerate yesterday. We either think it was better or worse than it was - you know, the good old days. We over-estimate tomorrow; we think we can do more than we can - always. And that's why we put off everything till tomorrow.

I find that the further I go back, the better things were, whether they happened or not.

There is no illusion so permanent as that which enables us to look backward with complacency; there is no mental process so deceptive as the comparing of recollections with realities.

It is a curious fact that in bad days we can very vividly recall the good time that is now no more; but that in good days, we have only a very cold and imperfect memory of the bad.