Quotes About Nostalgia

There's things I remember and things I forget. I miss you; I guess that I should.

If dreams are like movies, the memories are films about ghosts.

It was great, wasn't it—because it was ours.

But really I wanted to burn these childhood artifacts, because the lines -meant for escape- served as a reminder instead. I wanted to burn my memories.

We spent the time running free and unsupervised all over the island, and going out in boats on our own. For this was the 1970s, when the notion of childcare was to open the front door and say: 'Bye kids, come back when your hungry. Don't fall off a cliff...' -From The Writer's Map chapter First Steps

She wonders if memory is little more than this: a series of erasure and perfected selections.

Because a place can do many things against you, and if it's your home or if it was your home at one time, you still love it. That's how it works.

Well-- My mother paused, and her tone was reflective in that way that is inevitably sad, because the past is sad. What I remember, she said, is that you were always such a dear little girl.

Maybe my homesickness was a form of prescience because when I look back, it's the circumstances of this very car ride that I recognize as irretrievable: the experience of driving nowhere in particular with my sister, both of us seventeen years old, the open windows causing our hair to blow wildly; that feeling of being unencumbered; that confidence that our futures would inform the way we wanted them to and our real lives were just beginning.

Now I think, Jean. Jean! You got your wish! The fire drill is finished, but so is everything else. Did we believe we could pick and choose the parts that passed so quickly? Today, even the boring parts, even when it was freezing outside and half the girls were barefoot- all of it was a long time ago.

Oh, how different my life would have been had I not grown up in the same house with my grandmother, how much narrower and blander!

They only half-jokingly speculated about whether they were the last two single people from their high school class

Everybody of my generation has the same memory. We were twelve or thirteen or we were twenty-one, for that matter, and we were going to be veterinarians or we were, like Ringo, going to own a hairdresser's parlor. We walked into the record store and saw the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. We thought together, 'Life can be other than it has been.

Today I live on an island, in a house that is sad, hard, severe, that I built for myself, solitary on a sheer rock over the sea: a house that is the spectre, the secret image of prison. The image of my nostalgia. Maybe I never desired, not even then, to escape from jail. Man is not meant to live freely in freedom, but to be free inside a prison.

She went on and on, until Jeff had a sense of family spreading out around them endlessly, and only an hour later, when she was lost in reminiscences, did he understand that the names she mentioned, the people she spoke of, were most of them long ago dead. The family spread not out and around, but back, back into time.

They spent almost four dollars on supper at the mall, and none of them had dessert. They had hamburgers and french fries and, after Dicey thought it over, milkshakes.

They turned, wiping back sweat-dampened hair. Their grandmother had a cantaloupe cut up into thick slices. She had arranged the slices on a metal cookie sheet.

Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

I don't want the corpses of flowers about me.

There's so much of you here with me, really, it's a pity you aren't all here.

She felt like fastening little labels on the furniture: Lady Louise Carrington Lounge Chair, Last used August 1923. Not for the benefit of posterity: but to remove her own self into another world, another realm of existence.

is like being surrounded by the sounds from childhood. Hearing your parents talk at dinner. The clinking of silverware on plates and the wood table. It feels like when your mom comes close to say good night as you drift off to sleep. They are the sounds of being surrounded by intimacy. The first years of life. Of being embraced.

At night the years come back and perch around my bed like ghosts.

Mine is a story of craving. Each memory makes me a child again.