Quotes About Nostalgia

I am fading away. Slowly but surely. Like the sailor who watches his home shore gradually disappear, I watch my past recede. My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory.

Now that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph not a poem.

There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won't complain.

There is no greater grief than to find no happiness, but happiness in what is past.

I'm always nervous about going home, just as I am nervous about rereading books that have meant a lot to me.

The missingness of the missing. We know what that feels like. Every endeavor, every kiss, every stab in the heart, every letter home, every leaving, is a ransack of what's in front of us in the service of what's lost.

He doesn't take a photo or a video because he wants to remember — by which he means he wants to misremember because the moment is made up of what the camera can't capture.

What is memory anyway but a painful dispute with the past?

When I sing the dogs sit quiet and people who pass in the night stop their jabbering and discontent and think of other times, when they were happy. And I sing of other times, when I was happy, though I know that these are figments of my mind and nowhere I have ever been.

The past is magnetic. It draws us in.

Getting older happens suddenly. It's like swimming out to sea and realising that the shore you're making for isn't the shore where you started out.

Someone you loved and what happened. That's all there is when you dig in your pockets.

and what is memory but a rope slung across time?

And memories, sometimes, are places we go to honor the dead.

I'm living on my memories like a cheap has-been.

I looked back at you. These moments that are talismans and treasure

She hated the small and the mean, and yet that is all she had. I bought a few big houses myself along the way, simply because I was trying out something for her. In fact, my tastes were more modest -- but you don't know that until you have bought and sold for the ghost of your mother.

Yes, the past is another country, but once that we can visit and once there we can bring back the things we need.

HE: History has no smell. ME: Is that why we are nostalgic for it? HE: Breathe in, breathe out. The past doesn't stink like the present.

But the rags and the ribbons turn to years and then the years are gone.

In cetatea cuvintelor despre care v-am povestit, mirosul de fragi era mirosul caracteristic casei despre care inca nu v-am povestit.

If I could have seen her just once again I should have been content to die at that moment.

The Photograph and the Journal

And you, Mackie," said the doctor. "It's been a long time.