We label the feelings of our childhood with the names we learn as adults and brightly, confidently, refer to that old “anguish” or “despair” or “elation.” The confidence of liars. For those words meant nothing to us then; what we lacked as children was precisely the power to designate and dismiss, and when we describe the emotions of one age with the language of another, we are merely applying stickers to locked trunks, calling “fragile” or “perishable” contents that, even were we to view them again, would be unrecognizable.
–Edmund White, Nocturnes for the King of Naples