"When people look back at their childhood..." - Quote by Victor Hugo
When people look back at their childhood or youth, their wistfulness comes from the memory, not of what their lives had been in those years, but of what life had then promised to be. The expectation of some indefinable splendor, of the unusual, the exciting, the great is an attribute of youth and the process of aging is the process of that expectations' gradual extinction. One does not have to let it happen. But that fire dies for lack of fuel, under the gray weight of disappointments.
More by Victor Hugo
More on Youth
“You are young. No hungry generations tread you down. The past does not mock you with the ruins of a beauty the secret of whose creation you have lost”
“We should amuse our evening hours of life in cultivating the tender plants, and bringing them to perfection, before they are transplanted to a happier clime.”
“Old age, especially an honored old age, has so great authority, that this is of more value than all the pleasures of youth.”
More on Memory
“Come near; I would, before my time to go,Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways:Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.”
“During the first nineteen months of my life I had caught glimpses of broad, green fields, a luminous sky, trees and flowers which the darkness that followed could not wholly blot out. If we have once seen, "the day is ours, and what the day has shown."”
“The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable.”