Quotes About Nostalgia

A coat hanger of a body trying to remember the coat that years before had fallen off

Once upon a time...long ago in a far-off place that everyone knows is not here or now or us.

Even in Kyoto when I hear the cuckoo I long for Kyoto.

we wish we had never known.

And since that is not how it has been for a long time, you want, this time, to make it last, this glistening one moment, this cool air, this new living, so that you can preserve a feeling of it, inasmuch as when it comes again it may just be too late. You may just be too old. And in truth, of course, this may be the last time that you will ever feel this way again.

entering the past is a precarious business, since the past strives but always half-fails to make us who we are.

My parents...were people running from the past, who didn't look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.

In the thirties, after they were married, they lived simply and only for each other and for the day. They drank some, lived on the road with my father's salesman's job. They had a good time and felt they had little to look back on, and didn't look.

Things you did,things you never did,things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.

We drove up onto the interstate and went toward Spokane, where I had lived once and Arlene had, too, though we didn't know each other then the old days, before marriage and children and divorce, before we met the lives we would eventually lead, and that we would be happy with or not.

Time changes the places that knew us, and if we go back after years, still even then it is not the same spot; the gate swings differently, new thatch has been put on the old gables, the road has been widened, and the sward the driven sheep lingered on has gone. (Wild Flowers)

Books — the warm, leather-skinned weight of them in your hands, the way they smelled when you lifted them close to your face. The unfeasibly heart-jolting shock once, as a tome fell heavily open at some much-visited page, divided itself neatly in two blocky halves along the spine — and you thought, guiltily, that you'd broken it.

Was a time... Sure. And there was another fucking time the summers never seemed to end and you'd never paid for it in your life. Remember that? Time passes, Max - get over it. Skip the fucking nostalgia, let's get where we're at.

You never forget a beautiful thing that you have made," he said. "Even after you eat it, it stays with you—always." I

You never forget a beautiful thing that you have made," he said. "Even after you eat it, it stays with you—always.

When you know your time in a place is running out, you try to fix such moments in your mind's eye.

Recuerdo que algún día yo le hablé de mi río y una como tormenta se agitó en sus estrañas. No sé si fue mi pecho que tembló de recuerdo o si fueron mis ojos que asomaron nostalgias. I remember a day when I spoke of my river and something like a storm stirred in his being. Was it my breast that trembled with the memory Was it nostalgia that showed through my eyes

feel as if I'm visiting home in a dream, where everything yet nothing is the way it should be, where the best of what you have and what you wish for are briefly, tantalizingly united. Tealing

Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.

He didn't really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.

But I've been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I certainly don't get soggy at the memory of some childhood knickknack; nor do I want to deceive myself sentimentally about something that wasn't even true at the time—love of the old school, and so on. But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty.

When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later.. later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches.

What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?

First love fixes a life for ever: this much I have discovered over the years. It may not outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence.