“The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.”

“Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we have never had”

“I had grown accustomed to living within myself. I was resigned to the knowledge that I had lost all appreciation of the outside world, that the loss of its bright colors was an inseparable part of the loss of my childhood, and that, in a certain sense, one had to pay for freedom and maturity of the soul with the renunciation of this cherished aura. But now, overjoyed, I saw that all this had only been buried or clouded over and that it was still possible—even if you had become liberated and had renounced your childhood happiness—to see the world shine and to savor the delicious thrill of the child’s vision.”

“I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.”

“We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice — that is, until we have stopped saying “It got lost,” and say, “I lost it.”

“If I’d been there, I might have been able to do something. But I wasn’t, and I lost them.”“And if you’d been there,” Ty said softly, “I would have lost you.”