She tried, sometimes, to remember how it had been to be young. Or even, not quite so old.

Her eyes were the eyes of one who can remember; one whose childhood does not fade like a dream, nor whose youth vanish like a sunbeam. She would not take life loosely and incoherently, in parts, and let one season slip as she entered on another: she would retain and add; often review from the commencement, and so grow in harmony and consistency as she grew in years.

All her youth is gone, her beautiful youth outworn, Daughter of tarn and tor, the moors that were once her home No longer know her step on the upland tracks forlorn Where she was wont to roam.

I don't miss my youth. I'm glad I had one, but I wouldn't like to start over.

Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.

But it didn’t seem to Lyra that she would ever grow up.

She was a young person whose reveries never were in retrospect. For her past was no treasury of distinct memories, all hoarded and classified, some brighter than others and more highly valued. All memories were for her but as the motes in one fused radiance that followed her and made more luminous the pathway of her future.

was to remember like a brief blur my life as it once was, when I was only a daughter, not a mother.

Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkle from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.

It is strange how the romances of the teenage years retain a poignancy all through life - how a girl who turns you down when you're 16 retains an aura in your memory even long after you, and she, have ceased to be who you were then. I attended my high school reunion a couple of weeks ago and discovered, in the souvenir booklet assembled by the reunion committee, that one of the girls in my class had a crush on me all those years ago. I would have given a great deal to have had that information at the time.

a woman will return, looking for the girl she was

She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.

She had a full measure of youth’s indifference to the past.