“The halcyon days of childhood, a time when everything lay open before him, when the most minor episodes could be construed as events and every chance encounter … gave rise to fresh insights.”

“Minor things can become moments of great revelation when encountered for the first time.”

“She's got a smile that it seems to me remind me of the childhood memories when everything was fresh as a bright blue sky.”

“Lay down your head, and close your sleepy eyes, and when again they open, the sun will rise.”

“It was the tenderness mingled with melancholy which we bring to a time that belongs irrevocably to the past, when a pale, delicate shadow rises from it bearing the lilies of the dead, and in it we find a forgotten likeness to ourselves. And that faint, wistful shadow, that pale scent, seemed to vanish away into a wide, full, warm stream – the life that now lay open before him.”

“Dickens writes that an event, "began to be forgotten, as most affairs are, when wonder, having no fresh food to support it, dies away of itself.”