“Deep down we've never been who we think we once were, and we only remember what never happened.”

“We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.”

“What they don't know is that we all belong to the places we've never even been before. If there's any kind of legitimate nostalgia, it's for everything we've never seen, the women we've never slept with, never dreamed of, the friends we haven't made, the books we haven't read, all that food steaming in the pots we've never eaten out of. That's the only kind of real nostalgia there is.”

“It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if there was ever a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing, that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn’t as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.”

“Grownups! Everyone remembers them. How strange and even sad it is that we never became what they were: beings noble, infallible, and free. We never became them. One of the things we discover as we live is that we never become anything different from what we are. We are no less ourselves at forty than we were at four, and because of this we know grownups as Grownups only once in life: during our own childhood. We never meet them in our lives again, and we will miss them always.”

“We understand now, we've been made to understand, and to embrace the understanding that who we are is who we were.”