It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.
Oscar WildeMany children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.
J. R. R. TolkienMan is the only animal capable of reasoning, though many others possess the faculty of memory and instruction in common with him.
AristotleLovers often invest their first meetings with retrospective significance, as if to try to conjure the elements of the numinous out of the stubborn witness of the everyday.
Christopher HitchensI think – I don’t know, maybe it’s nostalgia. But the choice, losing the choice to be able to use film is going to be – it’s gone. It’s going to be gone.
Keanu ReevesI had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker – yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action. I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday.
Jane GoodallI think it speaks of all women having those few special things that make them feel feminine. And so when I was a little girl, I would associate Guerlain with that.
Angelina JolieMy parents weren’t actors or studio executives.
Dwayne JohnsonContext and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.
Anthony BourdainI’m from the generation that had the boys‘ door and the girls‘ door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.
Margaret AtwoodWith my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.
Abraham MaslowIt’s always a struggle growing up in Akron.
LeBron JamesI’m the same kid who used to hop the trains with headphones and just go to downtown Manhattan, walk around and listen to music or walk through the city. The fame restricts that. It’s a small complaint in comparison to the benefits I get from it, but the restrictive part is what I don’t like – and the fact that it’s not reversible.
J. ColeI have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.
Emily DickinsonWhen I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It’s like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.
Haruki MurakamiBut I did ‚Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.‘ They made a cereal out of it, so once you’ve had a cereal, it doesn’t get much more surreal than that. Surreal cereal.
Keanu ReevesAll the learnin‘ my father paid for was a bit o‘ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.
George EliotI am a child but I have to think and act like a woman, this business forces you to.
RihannaI listen to my old records and I think, ‚How did I ever get on the radio?‘
Dolly PartonA child wants things to be a certain way. When you get to be an adult, you just understand that some people are good, some are not, and you can’t be naive.
Robert GreeneI’m just a kid – I’ve got a lot of stuff to do yet.
Clint EastwoodMy father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories – not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father’s generation. It’s a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.
Haruki MurakamiIt’s still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.
Maya AngelouWhen I was on TV in the ’80s, I wasn’t thinking, ‚There’s a 10-year-old kid watching this and in 15 years, he’s gonna be doing stuff that was influenced by me.‘ I was trying to get my five minutes together. So now that those people are comedians and they’re influenced by me – it’s bizarre.
Steven WrightI was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty.
Narendra ModiWhen I was young, poverty was so common that we didn’t know it had a name.
Lyndon B. JohnsonIn fact, you couldn’t give me anything to make me go back to being a teenager. Never. No, I hated it.
J. K. RowlingThere’s something about pulling out a real tape from a shelf and looking at it and knowing that ‚Everlong‘ is on it, or ‚Best of You‘ is on it, and it’s really special.
Dave GrohlI loved cowboy movies when I was a kid. When I was five years old, I was already wearing a cowboy hat and suit. When I grew up, I knew John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Kirk Douglas and so on.
Jackie ChanI didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.
Margaret AtwoodI’m German in my mind, but from a Germany that doesn’t exist any more.
Karl LagerfeldI hated school. Even to this day, when I see a school bus it’s just depressing to me. The poor little kids.
Dolly PartonI never played with anything like toys.
Karl LagerfeldIn ‚Changeling,‘ I tried to show something you’d never see nowadays – a kid sitting and looking at the radio. Just sitting in front of the radio and listening. Your mind does the rest.
Clint EastwoodI hate to mention age, but I come from an era when we weren’t consumed by technology and television.
Jimmy BuffettIt feels kinda weird being back in a high school cause I haven’t been in a high school for about a year. So um, it’s kinda interesting coming back, and y’know seeing the lockers, with all the signs, the handmade signs, so being in high school again is a little bit strange but in a good way.
Taylor SwiftDoo-wop is special music to me because it’s so straightforward and melody-driven and captures emotions.
Bruno MarsFrom a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the ‚Pilgrim’s Progress,‘ my first collection was of John Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes.
Benjamin FranklinEven as a child, Muhammad Ali got perverse pleasure out of being different. He liked the attention it got him, but most of all he just liked being himself: odd and independent.
Robert GreeneIn my day, there were no vet video games.
Karl LagerfeldIf I could have worked from the time I was born until I was 18 and never had to work again, I would have done it.
Abby Lee MillerAs a kid from Compton, you can get all the success in the world and still question your worth.
Kendrick LamarWhen I was growing up, I wasn’t an extrovert. If anything, I was an introverted kid and a very average pupil at school. I was very quiet.
Clint EastwoodThe harvest of old age is the recollection and abundance of blessing previously secured.
Marcus Tullius CiceroI was brought up differently than the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.
Marilyn MonroeA great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.
Benjamin DisraeliWhen I was five, I think, that’s when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries.
Marilyn MonroeMy father, who was jailed for stealing on more than one occasion, just abandoned his fatherly responsibilities and disappeared. I grew up working from the time I was nine years of age. Money was a big issue everywhere I lived.
Wayne DyerWhere I grew up – I grew up on the north side of Akron, lived in the projects. So those scared and lonely nights – that’s every night. You hear a lot of police sirens, you hear a lot of gunfire. Things that you don’t want your kids to hear growing up.
LeBron JamesThe first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.
Dylan ThomasI had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.
Brian EnoWhen I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.
Terry PratchettYou tell me: Can you live crushed under the weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing.
Pope FrancisIt is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn’t have an eventful childhood.
Harper LeeThe schools ain’t what they used to be and never was.
Will RogersA child thinks 20 shillings and 20 years can scarce ever be spent.
Benjamin FranklinWhen I was a young kid, I did not even dream about playing for my country. It was such a farfetched thing to play for India.
Sunil ChhetriThings ain’t what they used to be and never were.
Will RogersWhen I was 8 years old, it mattered what my favorite singer said and wore and expressed opinions about.
Taylor SwiftNothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
Virginia Woolf