Quotes About Nostalgia

All at once I felt clearly and calmly that the feeling of that time had gone never to return, like the time itself, and that to bring it back now would be not only impossible, but painful and forced.

They wept because they were friends, and because they were kindhearted, and because they—friends from childhood—had to think about such a base thing as money, and because their youth was over. . .

Oh, it's wonderful to be your age,' continued Anna. 'I know and remember that blue haze, like you see on the mountains in Switzerland. The haze covering everything at that blessed point when your childhood is coming to an end, and the path leading from that huge, carefree, happy circle becomes narrower and narrower, and it is both jolly and terrifying entering that enfilade, even though it is bright and beautiful...Who has not been through that?

Oh! How good it is to be your age! I remember, and I know that blue haze like the mist on the mountains of Switzerland. That mist which covers everything in that blissful time when childhood is just ending, and out of the vast circle, happy and gay, there is a path growing narrower and narrower, and it is delightful and alarming to enter the ballroom, bright and splendid as it is...

Sitting in his old schoolroom on the sofa with little cushions on the arms and looking into Natasha's wildly eager eyes, Rostov was carried back into that world of home and childhood which had no meaning for anyone else, but gave him some of the greatest pleasure in his life.

Anna Mikhaylovna was already embracing her and weeping. The countess wept too. They wept because they were friends, and because they were kindhearted, and because they - friends from childhood - had to think about such a base thing as money, and because their youth was over.... But those tears were pleasant to them both.

I often think with regret of that fresh, beautiful feeling of boundless, disinterested love which came to an end without having ever found self-expression or return. It is strange how, when a child, I always longed to be like grown-up people, and yet how I have often longed, since childhood's days, for those days to come back to me!

No," he said to himself, "however good that life of simplicity and toil may be, I cannot go back to it. I love HER.

Pero ¿qué había sido de aquella llama que en Moscú animaba su rostro haciendo brillar sus ojos y prestando luminosidad a su sonrisa?

He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it.

The further back he looked, the more life there had been in him; both the more sweetness to life, and the more of life itself. And the two tendencies had become firmly intertwined.

And in imagination he began to recall the best moments of his pleasant life. But strange to say none of those best moments of his pleasant life now seemed at all what they had then seemed – none of them except the first recollections of childhood. There, in childhood, there had been something really pleasant with which it would be possible to live if it could return. But the child who had experienced that happiness existed no longer, it was like a reminiscence of somebody else.

and above all, her smile, which carried him into a fairyland where he felt softened and filled with tenderness as he remembered feeling on rare occasions in his early childhood.

I happened to observe a mother lifting her eight-year-old boy in her arms. As she did so she laughed and said, "You're getting so big you'll be lifting me soon." It was the simplest of statements. Yet I felt something transiently touching about the scene merely because millions upon millions of mothers reaching back into the dawn of history must have said the same thing to their children at some time and because other millions will say it in the remote future long

Ah, how good! How nice!" he said to himself, when he remembered that his wife and the French were no more.

There, in childhood, there had been something so transcendently pleasant that if it would only return he could carry on living. But the person who had lived through all these pleasures no longer existed: it was as though he were reminiscing about some old friend.

A feeling such as she had known when about to take the first plunge in bathing came upon her, and she crossed herself. That familiar gesture brought back into her soul a whole series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly the darkness that had covered everything for her was torn apart, and life rose up before her for an instant with all its bright past joys.

does it ever happen to you to feel as if there were nothing more to come—nothing; that everything good is past? And to feel not exactly dull, but sad?

So many memories of the past rise up when you try to resurrect in your imagination the features of a beloved being, that peering through those memories you see the features dimly, as if through tears - the tears of imagination.

If you're lucky enough to fall in love, that's one thing. Otherwise all that was ever truly beautiful to me was boyhood. It's the meal we sup on for the rest of our lives. Love puts the icing on life. But if you don't find it...you must call on your childhood memories over and over till you do.

To be homeward bound, no matter what tragic memories you have harbored, is unlike any voyage a man can ever make.

When I was really little I would sit in the back of my dad's car when he'd be playing old-school music. He'd turn down the music and turn around and I'd be singing and know all of the words but I didn't even know how to talk. From then on I've always wanted to be a singer.

My friends are gone and my hair is grey. I ache in places I used to play. And I'm crazy for love but I'm not coming on. I'm just paying my rent every day in the tower of song.

I almost went to bed without remembering the four white violets I put in the button-hole of your green sweater and how i kissed you then and you kissed me shy as though I'd never been your lover