Quotes About Nostalgia

old General Compson had gone to his fathers at last—or to whatever bivouac old soldiers of that war, blue or gray either, probably insisted on going to since probably no place would suit them for anything resembling a permanent stay —

Sometimes it was mild elation. Often it was a pleasant melancholy.

the persistent nostalgia that infected most surfers, even young ones - the notion that it was always better yesterday, and better still the day before.

He stood there unsteady in the cold, mumbling syllables which almost resolved into her name, as though he could recall, and summon back, a time before death entered the world, before accident, before magic, and before magic despaired, to become religion.

Go out among them and tell them that their nostalgia for places they have never been is sex

She was a page torn from a calendar, a year folded neatly and laid aside in some place you never look.

Seems like it's peaceful, just bein' in a country that lays the way you remember it layin

He was seized with longing so intense it ached in his chest, he wanted it always to keep, to drag out secretly and study it like a yellowed photograph, and he thought I am home, this is me, this is where I have been rambling down to all these years.

He was wishing the past was a place you could backtrack to, take a sideroad you'd walked hurriedly past, wake somebody from a bad dream he was having.

He never saw Molly again.

How it was, when you lost things, it was like you only knew for the first time that you'd ever had them. (...) You didn't wake up every morning and say yes and yes to every little thing. But little things were what it was all made of. Or just somebody to see, there, when you woke up.

Had me this boy once. You kinda remind me . . ." She turned and surveyed the corridor. "Johnny, his name was.

Nothing before the 2020s has ever seemed entirely real, to me. Hard to imagine they weren't constantly happy, given all they still had. Tigers, for instance.

Unstuck her in time, day-sleeping in her bedroom. How old was she? Seven, seventeen, twenty-seven? Dusk or dawn? Couldn't tell by the light outside. Checked her phone. Evening. The house silent, her mother probably asleep. Out through the smell of her grandfather's fifty years of National Geographic, shelved in the hall.

Noches que con gran cuidado eliminaste de la desordenada baraja de tu pasado

and the sort of Italian restaurant furniture, in dark welded steel, that might have belonged to any decade of the past hundred years.

the smell of her grandfather's fifty years of National Geographic, shelved in the hall. Downstairs

When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well. Surely

mechanical watches partake of what my friend John Clute calls the Tamagotchi Gesture. They're pointless in a peculiarly needful way; they're comforting precisely because they require tending.

The old man reminded Tito of those ghost-signs, fading high on the windowless sides of blackened buildings, spelling out the names of products made meaningless by time.

I didn't come out here to be abused by vintage product from the Hefty toy department.

He wore shoes that made her think of old French priests, bicycling

For some reason, now, she saw the panel in the Roberts, all those faces. Read Us the Book of the Names of the Dead. All the Marlys, she thought all the girls she'd been through the long season of youth.

Butch: Y'know, when I was a kid, I always figured on being a hero when I grew up. Sundance: Too late now. Butch: You didn't have to say that—what'd you have to say that for?