Quotes About Nostalgia

People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it." They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could.

Becoming a child again is what is impossible. That's what you have a legitimate reason to be upset over. Childhood is the most valuable thing that's taken away from you in life, if you think about it.

Childhood is the most valuable thing that's taken away from you in life, if you think about it.

Heather Vogel Frederick

Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart. —Winnie-the-Pooh

They say it is what you never imagine can be lost that is hardest to live without.

It was as if those school years bred a nostalgia so deep into the cells that the body woke to it each fall as naturally as the squirrels in the park began their frenzied harvest, never mind the weather was still fine, the sun still gracing them all.

When I judged it to be tea-time I sat on an old stone wall and opened my tin of treacle biscuits. As I ate them I could hear mother banging the kettle on the hob and my brothers rattling their tea-cups. The biscuits tasted sweetly of the honeyed squalor of home – still only a dozen miles away.

Oft in the stilly night, Ere Slumber's chain has bound me, Fond memory brings the light Of other days around me; The smiles, the tears, Of boyhood years, The words of love then spoken; The eyes that shown Now dimmed and gone, The cheerful hearts now broken. (from When the Splendor Falls by Laurie McBain)

I looked around. This house only the night before had been a home, and serves as a storage locker for memories that I could barely remember and a bunch of things I'd rather forget.

The greatest act of love was to make a tape for someone. It was the only way we could share music and it was also a way of advertising yourself.

If I had not kissed anyone, or danced with anyone, or had a reason to cry, the music made me feel as if I had gone through all that anyway.

I got to know [teen music] as we absorb music in passing but can remember only its seriousness and weight.

A journal is personal travel insurance, protecting your memories from strolling off un-chaperoned, vanishing without a goodbye or backwards glance. This is the driving force behind most people's road journals, and although basic, its importance cannot be overstated. The human memory is feeble and needs all the help it can get.

I have done this before. In other cities, other nights. So often I can repeat each gesture without owning any of them.

The past. The Golden Age of the past. What a nostalgia we all feel for it. Yet we don't want it when we get it. Try the South Seas.

The pennycandystore beyond the El is where i first fell in love with unreality Jellybeans glowed in the semi-gloom of that september afternoon A cat upon the counter moved among the licorice sticks and tootsie rolls and Oh Boy Gum Outside the leaves were falling as they died A wind had blown away the sun A girl ran in Her hair was rainy Her breasts were breathless in the little room Outside the leaves were falling and they cried Too soon! too soon!

In intellectual and popular culture, war has come to be regarded by many as a peculiar psychosis of Western civilization. This atmosphere of Western self-reproach and neo-Rousseauian nostalgia is prevalent in the views espoused by many postwar anthropologists.

We want to forget until we start to forget. from the poem Regret

Then it's not the past I yearn for, but the idea of a time when everything important has not yet happened: — Lawrence Raab, from section 5 of "The Uses of Nostalgia," What We Don't Know About Each Other (Penguin, 1993)

The strongest thing that baseball has going for it today are its yesterdays.

I cried for what should have been.

When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.

You can go home again ... so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.