She could remember the girl she used to be with fondness, but it wasn’t a youth she cared to recapture.

I'd learned to feel nostalgia for my own youth while I was living it.

I sometimes wish to be a kid again and go through life a little differently.

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

And yet she could not forgive herself. Even as an adult, she wished only that she could go back and change things: the ungainly things she’d worn, the insecurity she’d felt, all the innocent mistakes she made.

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.

She imagined herself at age nine, running through these very halls, crying out to her older self across the years.

In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.

We were young once and then we weren’t.

I want you to try and remember what it was like to have been very young.
And particularly the days when you were first in love; when you were like a person sleepwalking, and you didn’t quite see the street you were in, and didn’t quite hear everything that was said to you.
You’re just a little bit crazy. Will you remember that, please?

She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst… Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.

She’d had so much more time when she was younger. She couldn’t help thinking she’d wasted much of it.

Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what is was.

I remember what it was...to be young, very young. When everything, touching and tasting-everything- was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete.