Quotes About Nostalgia

It was one of those rare times when remembering the dead was more inmportant than tending to the needs of the living.

In memory, she lived and moved and laughed, but all that a photograph could offer was one frozen moment of a life.

Life is a train ride, and at the many stations along the route, people important to us debark, never to get aboard again, until by the end of the journey, we sit in a passenger car where most of the seats are empty.

Je me suis souvenue des soixante ans de mon père. On avait mangé une choucroute à la République. C'était l'âge qu'avaient les parents. Un âge immense et abstrait. Maintenant c'est toi qui l'as. Comment est-ce possible? Une fille fait les quatre cents coups, se trimbale dans la vie juchée et peinturlurée et tout à coup se met à avoir soixante ans.

He could not call up the faces of his own mother and father, who had died three or four years before. He would look at a picture, and there they would be. Perhaps people were progressively harder to paint in the mind as they near one, loved by one. Perhaps clear memories came easily in proportion as they were ugly.

What seemed strangest to me when I found this diary was that I have no recollection of the day-to-day life it describes. If I do not recall them, where have those days gone? Where had they vanished to? I pondered the things that human beings lose to the past -from Diary of My Sixteenth Year

He closed his eyes and the warmth sank into his head, bringing an immediate sense of life. Reality came through the violent breathing, and with a sort of nostalgic remorse. He felt as though he was waiting tranquilly for some undefined revenge.

La conciencia de su propio cuerpo era inseparable del recuerdo de aquel abrazo.

As old age approached, Eguchi would, on nights when he had difficulty sleeping, sometimes remember the woman's words, and count up numbers of women on his fingers; but he did not stop at anything so simple as picturing those he would not mind kissing. He would travel back over memories of women with whom he had had affairs. An old love had come back tonight because the sleeping beauty had given him the illusion that he smelled milk.

Esperar a Oki es lo mismo que esperar el pasado… El tiempo y los ríos no corren para atrás.

Con todo, no podía reprimir los vívidos recuerdos de aquella pasión, su cuerpo se ponía tenso y comenzaba a temblar. Por fin la tensión se aflojaba y una deliciosa sensación de plenitud recorría sus miembros. Su amor del pasado había vuelto a la vida.

Con el correr del tiempo, el recuerdo de aquel abrazo se fue purificando dentro de Otoko; fue dejando de ser algo físico para convertirse en algo espiritual. Ahora ella ya no era pura y sin duda Oki tampoco lo era. Y sin embargo, su antiguo abrazo, tal como lo veía ahora, parecía puro. Aquel recuerdo —en el que ella intervenía y no intervenía, que parecía real e irreal— era una visión sagrada, una visión sublimada del abrazo de antaño.

In the spray the girl stood naked. The facts were different, but in the course of time Eguchi's mind had made them so. As he grew old, the hills of Kyoto and the trunks of the red pines in gentle clusters could sometimes bring the girl back to Eguchi; but memories as vivid as tonight's were rare. Was it the youth of the sleeping girl that invited them?

The memory of my father is wrapped up in white paper, like sandwiches taken for a day of work. Just as a magician takes towers and rabbits out of his hat, he drew love from his small body.

The echo of a great love is like the echo of a huge dog's barking in an empty Jerusalem house marked for demolition.

Ich fand nirgendwo so viel Kindheit wie in der Deutschen Sprache. Schmatzen, schnaufen, schluchzen, schlürfen: Viele deutsche Wörter klingen wie Onomatopoesie. Für die Neugeborenen klingt vielleicht jede Sprache so wie Deutsch für mich.

It was a kiss from the past.

Nostalgia is a luxury.

Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway.

If someone asked her just then what memory was, what the purest definition of memory was, she would say this: the street you were on when you first jumped in a pile of dead leaves. She was walking it right now. With every fresh crunch came the memory of previous crunches. She was permeated by familiar smells: wet woodchip and gravel around the base of the tree, newly laid turd underneath the cover of soggy leaves. She was moved by these sensations.

He smiles shyly at Leah. Aged ten he had a smile! Nathan Bogle: the very definition of desire for girls who had previously only felt that way about certain fragrant erasers. A smile to destroy the resolve of even the strictest teachers, other people's parents. Now she sees ten-year-olds and cannot believe they have inside them what she had inside her at the same age.

And in the past, Archie wondered, was it just that fewer people cheated? Were they more honest, and did they leave their front doors open, did they leave their kids with the neighbors, pay social calls, run up tabs with the butcher? The funny thing about getting old in a country is people always want to hear that from you. They want to hear it really was once a green and pleasant land. They need it.

The golden age of Luncheon Vouchers ended ten years ago. For ten years Mickey had been saying, "The golden age of Luncheon Vouchers is over." And that's what Archie loved about O'Connell's. Everything was remembered, nothing was lost. History was never revised or reinterpreted, adapted or whitewashed. It was as solid and as simple as the encrusted egg on the clock.

Well, you can't make old friends.