Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic, and vine-encumbered trees that silently wave twisted branches far aloft. Such a lot the gods gave to me - to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken. And yet I am strangely content and cling desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other.

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.

He thought about himself and to the young that always brings sadness.

You lost your childhood sense of wonder and of being present and happy. You lost your inner happiness because you built up this personality of unresolved pain, errors, fears, and desires that glommed onto you like a bunch of barnacles.

Those bitter sorrows of childhood! — when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.

I cannot imagine how anyone can go through life without carrying the memories of his childhood on the surface of his soul.

Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses his past and is dead for the future.

How sad to see a father with money and no joy. The man studied economics, but never studied happiness.

I hate him for himself, but despise him for the memories he revives.

[He] Attacks the past, but fears that, having destroyed it,
He will have nothing on which to lay his head.

Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy.

I think this man is suffering from memories.

A dreary sense of loneliness came over him as he realized how everything he had brought with him from home and from the old days seemed to fall away from him and let him go his own way, forgotten and forsaken. The door to the past was barred, and he stood outside, empty-handed and alone; whatever he needed and desired he must win for himself — new friends and new shelter, new affections and new memories.

He who has lived and thought can't help
despising people in his soul;
him who has felt disturbs
the ghost of irrecoverable days;
for him there are no more enchantments;
him does the snake of memories,
him does repentance bite.