Quotes About Nostalgia

When Flora was a young girl she used to try to "fix" moments in her memory. The notion that years of her life would pass and she would only remember snippets, seconds of the whole, distressed her. She came up with a plan and at various times-walking home from school or out with friends or just sitting at her desk she would think: This. Remember this.

One of the many qualities she and her mother shared was a mutual love for an event concluded. It was an inclination she fought all her life. She loved a party best when it was over and the house had been restored to order and she could sit in the quiet and replay the evening. Too often, she looked forward to the end of something-to beginning the remembering-more than the thing itself.

In some inexplicable way she'd been looking forward to it and all its attendant drama, because wasn't there something nearly lovely—when you were young enough—about guts churning and tear ducts being put to glorious overuse?

small-town girl. When

Once again John and I kissed good-bye.

Not everything worth keeping has to be useful.

Not everything worth keeping needs to be useful

One thing I'd learned about moving was that once you were there, it was better to just look ahead. Because even if you went back to visit the places and people you left behind, it was never the same — except in photos.

The whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life.

Admittedly, there is always a golden age, the one not ours, the one that once was or will someday be. One's own time is never satisfactory, except to the very rich or the smugly oblivious.

The Germans are sentimental. Their word Heimweh . The English say homesick; the same in plain Swedish. Hemsjuk . Leave it to the Germans to pull out, like some endless elastic belt of horrible sweetness, all that molasses woe.

Even after everyone had gone home, the house was filled with the good time they'd had, as if it could linger in the air like the voices and music lingered in memory. Mina wrapped the memory up and put it in her heart; there was a quiet gladness, deep like a tree and tall in her

Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent; it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.

The artist secretes nostalgia around life.

It is closing time in the gardens of the West.

Of all things broken and lost, porcelain troubles me most.

When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers. — Czeslaw Milosz, from "I Sleep A Lot," The Collected Poems 1931— 1987 . (The Ecco Press; First Edition edition 1988)

Most people, looking back at their childhood, see it as a misty country half-forgotten or only to be remembered through an evocative sound or scent, but some episodes of those short years remain clear and brightly coloured like a landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope.

In other words the little piece of polished wood had become one of her treasures. Sometimes she took it out and held it in her hand and thought about the man who had made it, and wondered what he had looked like; (she had such a very hazy idea of history that she imagined him shaggy and attired in the skin of a bear). And she wondered how the arrow had got broken and where the other piece of it could be . . . but although she searched assiduously, high and low, she never found it.

The glamorOf childish days is upon me, my manhood is castDown in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

It is curious, isn't it, that things you know well never look dirty and dilapidated—other people's old furniture looks shabby and moth-eaten. "I would never have that horrible old couch in my room," you say. But your own old couch is every bit as bad and you are not disgusted with its appearance; it is your friend, you see, and you remember it when it was new and smart. Friends that you have known for a long time and love very dearly never seem to grow old.

I'm glad you're here, Monkey," said Arthur Abbott at last. "I'm getting old, I suppose. Anyhow, I've come to the time of life when one old friend seems better than all the new friends in the world.

I switch on the light beside my bed and the old, beautiful room takes shape – the four-poster with its carved oak pillars, the dark oak chest, the dressing table with its prude petticoat of spotted muslin, the low, uneven ceiling, the wavy oak floor. How many hundreds and thousands of people have awakened in this room; awakened to their sorrows and their joys, their hopes and their fears?

I switch on the light beside my bed and the old, beautiful room takes shape – the four-poster with its carved oak pillars, the dark oak chest, the dressing table with its prude petticoat of spotted muslin, the low, uneven ceiling, the wavy oak floor. How many hundreds and thousands of people have awakened in this room; awakened to their sorrows and their joys, their hopes and their fears? Strange that I should have slept so well, untroubled by the haunting of their thoughts!