Quotes About Nostalgia

When he emerged, I'd stand on the stool amidst the steam and the aroma of uncapped Old Spice, watching my face wobble and drip in the medicine cabinet mirror.

Grandma and I were cautiously polite to each other. "Make yourself at home, Dolores," she said hesitantly as she opened the door to what had once been my mother's bedroom. The room smelled dry and dusty. The windows were stuck closed and there were little rows of insect carcasses along the sill. When I sat down on the hard mattress, it crackled under me.

Grandma turned her TV to thunderous volume and told me I mumbled. She was still an "Edge of Night" fan. Sometimes I'd grab a Coke from the refrigerator and slump down on the couch with her, slurping intentionally from the bottle. "I hope you don't sit like that in school," she said. "It's unladylike.

Mr. Nord, bald and boring, sold equipment to hospitals and was gone a lot on overnight trips. Mrs. Nord wore eye shadow and headbands that matched her shell tops and Bermudas. For lunch she made us foods she'd seen in the pages of her women's magazines: baked hot dogs coated in crushed Special K; English muffin pizzas; Telstar coolers (lemonade and club soda afloat with a toothpick-speared maraschino cherry—a sort of edible satellite that jabbed your lip as you drank).

I was watching how we'd filled the room with floating smoke, how our slightest movements stirred it. I was back at our old house on Carter Avenue, the night Daddy threw the barbell and Ma soaked herself in the tub, smoking, her brown nipples half in, half out of the water.

Evenings after the dishes, Grandma hobbled around the house with her frayed prayer book which was held together with rubber bands. Then she'd settle in front of the television to watch her westerns—"Bonanza," "Rawhide"—while I sat out at the kitchen signing corny get-well cards to Ma and pages of complaints to Jeanette.

If you squinted while looking at her from across a room, you would swear Mrs. Nord was Jackie Kennedy. My own mother sat alone on Bobolink Drive all day, talking to her parakeet, Petey, and worrying about dead children. Around the time of our move to Bobolink Drive, I stopped kissing my mother on the lips. It had been over four years since she'd lost the baby.

She shooed away the kiss, a distraction. "Grouchie Gertie," she said, softly. "I'd forgotten that.

Papa had loved to sit out here among his grapes and chicken coops and tomato and pepper plants—to sit in the sun and sip his homemade wine and remember Sicily. .

The other day I was looking for something in the bedroom closet and got an unexpected whiff of him from one of his sweaters . . ." His face crumpled up but he fought off crying. "The pain is almost physical, sometimes. I missed him so much that day that it gave me a bloody nose—just started bleeding for no reason. Hadn't

If I reach far back, I can see my father waving to my mother and me and climbing down from his ladder, spray gun in hand, as we arrive with his lunch in our turquoise-and-white car. Daddy reaches the ground and pulls off his face mask.

Old. I'm almost forty, probably as close now to Mrs. Masicotte's age as I am to the age of my parents as they sat on that lawn, laughing and blowing dandelion puffs at me, smoking their shared Pall Mall cigarettes and thinking Mrs. Masicotte was the answer to their future—that that black-and-white Emerson television set was a gift free and clear of the strings that would begin our family's unraveling.

I was on the brown plaid sofa, watching TV and Scotch-taping my bangs to my forehead because Jeanette said that kept them from drying frizzy. Across the room on the Barcalounger, my mother was having her nervous breakdown.

Of all sad words, of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'It might have been.' Let's add this thought, unto this verse: 'It might have been a great deal worse.

O past! O happy life! O songs of joy! In the air, in the woods, over fields, Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved! But my mate no more, no more with me! We two together no more. -from Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

Every passion borders on chaos, that of the collector on the chaos of memory.

It is true that countless facades of the city stand exactly as they stood in my childhood. Yet I do not encounter my childhood in their contemplation. My gaze has brushed them too often since, too often they have been in the décor and theatre of my walks and concerns.

The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture.

the images of my metropolitan childhood perhaps are capable, at their core, of preforming later historical experience' .

You and the quiet sky—I wish I had never gone away. What is the use of being one's self, if one is always changing?

Jobs pointed out as we walked in front of his old house.

The idealistic wind of the sixties is still at our backs, though, and most of the people I know who are my age have that ingrained in them forever.

He said that he would always harbor affection for Apple. "I'll always remember Apple like any man remembers the first woman he's fallen in love with.

sometimes tearing up at the memory, that once they were married