Quotes About Nostalgia

The nineties, ecstatic decade!

Happy is the novelist," claims Nabokov, "who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

To look back at all past work induces nausea [...] It's like taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated.

E in passato, si chiese Archie, la gente imbrogliava di meno? Era piu' onesta, lasciava la porta di casa aperta, affidava i figli ai vicini, faceva visite agli amici, aveva il conto aperto con il macellaio?

Here's the funny thing about literary criticism: it hates its own times, only realizing their worth twenty years later. And then, twenty years after that, it wildly sentimentalizes them, out of nostalgia for a collective youth. Condemned cliques become halcyon "movements" annoying young men, august geniuses.

Mnóstwo zjawisk, które dziÅ› okreÅ›lamy mianem syndromów, miaÅ'o wtedy prostsze nazwy. Czasy byÅ'y prostsze. To wÅ'aÅ›nie dlatego ludzie mówiÄ… o nich stare, dobre czasy.

Chuck functions here as a kind of authenticity fetish, allowing Hans (and the reader) the nostalgic pleasure of returning to a narrative time when symbols and mottoes were full of meaning and novels weren't neurotic, but could aim themselves simply and purely at transcendent feeling.

our memories are getting more beautiful and less real every day.

She let Howard reinvent, retouch. When, on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Jerome had played his parents an ethereal, far more beautiful version of 'Hallelujah' by a kid called Buckley, Kiki had thought yes, that's right, our memories are getting more beautiful and less real every day.

I felt like some old diary she'd found in a drawer: a reminder of a more innocent and foolish time in her life.

Ryan was convinced of the ageing fifties motto 'Live fast, die young', and, though his scooter didn't do more than 22 m.p.h. downhill...

Yet when I waved at those two girls I noticed I couldn't rid myself of the idea that they were timeless symbols of girlhood, or of childish friendship.

In a fit of nostalgia, and because he was the only man Samad knew on this little island, Samad had sought Archie out, moved into the same London borough. And slowly but surely a kind of friendship was being rekindled between the two men. 'You play like a faggot,' said Samad

You could drown in memories like these, but she tried to swim free of them. She jumped over the small wall that fringed the Iqbal house, as she had a million times over, and rang the doorbell. Past tense, future imperfect

It was nostalgia for an era and a culture that had meant nothing to me in the first place, and perhaps because of this I was, in the eyes of my colleagues, cool, by virtue of not being like them.

Generally she kept her head down, but on the occasions she raised it she was treated to the most intimate of panoramic views: the scattered possessions of the three people she had created. Several small items made her cry: a tiny woollen bootie, a broken orthodontic retainer, a woggle from a cub-scout tie. She had not become Malcolm X's private secretary. She never did direct a movie or run for the Senate. She could not fly a plane. But here was all this.

My childhood took place in the widening gap.

People like us, we can't be nostalgic. We've no home in the past. Nostalgia is a luxury.

You saw a fluttering fan before her face and magnolia blooms and sleepy lakes under the moonlight when she walked.

Some of dese mornin's and it won't be long, you gointuh wake up callin' me and Ah'll be gone.

They, the men, were saving with the mind what they lost with the eye. The women took the faded shirt and muddy overalls and laid them away for remembrance.

Funny thing, he said sitting in Zeke's kitchen with his wife, things dat happened long time uhgo used to seem way off, but now it all seems lak it wuz yistiddy. You think it's dead but de past ain't stopped breathin' yet.

I still love Abba.

Abba and me, we were the 70s.