Quotes About Nostalgia

The past is the present's toy and plaything, gratifyingly unable to answer back.

Vivimos como si la memoria fuese una consigna de equipajes bien construida y atendida por un personal eficiente.

Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?

Photographs were useful, but somehow always confirmed the memory rather than liberating it.

Ma se nostalgia significa il ricordo potente di un'emozione forte, e il rimpianto di non ritrovare più sensazioni del genere nella vita, allora mi dichiaro colpevole. da Il senso di una fine

I keep alive our lost private language.

At the end of my first year at university, I was at home for three months, visibly and unrepentantly bored. Those of the same age today will find it hard to imagine the laboriousness of communication back then. Most of my friends were far-flung, and—by some unexpressed but clear parental mandate—use of the telephone was discouraged. A letter, and then a letter in reply. It was all slow-paced, and lonely.

His grandfather had white peacocks roosting in a catalpa tree.

an?msanan hazlar kadar, an?msanan ac?lar konusunda da nostaljik olmak mümkün

Qué vanidad tan curiosa es la que impulsa al presente a esperar que el pasado se amamante de él.

Back in 'my day'—though I didn't claim ownership of it at the time, still less do I now . . .

U]ns verband jene angenehme, anspruchslose Art von Freundschaft, die ausschließlich auf langer Dauer beruht. Wir hatten wenig gemeinsam, kannten aber sonst kaum jemanden, der sich an uns als Neunjährige beim Ponyreiten erinnerte; so hatten unsere gelegentlichen Begegnungen immer etwas Behagliches.

When I was young, men like my father would often come home and put on their smoking jacket over their perfectly ordinary trousers, as a way of relaxing in the evening.

The past, as we have been told so many times, is a foreign country where things are done differently.

They say one sign of growing old is that the past becomes more real than the present and already I can feel the fingers of those lost decades closing their grip round my imagination, making more recent memory seem somehow greyer and less bright.

Así es cómo funciona el olvido: eliminando el pasado y no hablando nunca de él.

even a poisoned, desolate childhood can be missed.

When boys grow into men, their boyishness is still apparent each time they abandon themselves a little. I stretch against them sometimes--lovesickness, it is the same ache as homesickness for me--and I marvel. The length of their bodies, it's where I find my house, my old street, Ashbury Park and all of its yowling--men, they walk around carrying my country, my motherland, and they don't even know. They don't have the tiniest idea.

Later, your mother says, Didn't everything used to have a name?

Their old life seemed far away and remote to him now, like a dream he could not quite remember. The bright green grass, the roses, the house on the wide street not far from the sea -- that was another time, a different year.

My brother wrote another refrigerator magnet poem, when he was probably nineteen or twenty: 'When the flood comes/ I will swim to a symphony/ go by boat to some picture show/ and maybe I will forget about you.' How did he know way, way back then? How is it I know only now?

It's been years, and yet she still talks about my first New York studio like it was the hole in a Khmer Rouge prison.

Each of us wore our memories of what might have been.

Who would awaken the past? It shines like a sunrise And cuts like a fine blade.