Celtic Christianity was introduced to Cornwall in the year 520 by Saint Petroc, a Brython from the kingdom of Glywysing, and other missionaries from Wales, as well as by Gaelic monks and holy women from Ireland; this "formative period" has left a legacy of granite high cross monuments throughout Cornwall.
Fermor remembered spending those first years, "said to be such formative ones, more or less as a small farmer's child run wild: they have left a memory of complete and unalloyed bliss".
From his formative years in the Warsaw Ghetto to his many decades in his new homeland, he left an exceptional legacy.
He was a sweet, singular person, one of those individuals who arrives in your life at a moment that you don't yet recognize as formative, and leaves a lasting mark on your sense of taste, of self-esteem, of what's possible.
For the baby boomers, the formative experience was the 1960s, leaving a legacy of permissiveness that endures to this day.
Moving from school to school had always felt like leaving a life behind, but leaving behind the most formative years of my life, high school, was a reality that was hard to grasp.
If you are fortunate enough to live to 92, you are also unfortunate enough to have few people left from your formative years.
Mr. Young's grandparents were a formative influence; he left Louisville, Ky., at 15 to live with his father in Chicago ("I was a kid from a small town in the mid-South who knew there was better, you know?"), but not before internalizing his grandparents' high standards.
The book may not be the most thorough account of Day's life; she leaves out some formative events — such as the abortion she had as a young woman — and, in her enthusiasm for writing about her fellow-travellers, it sometimes becomes unclear what she did, exactly.
But the earlier memories, made at a formative time, have never really left me.
