Quotes About Nostalgia

By the time we got home, Grandma would be cooking breakfast, and Grandpa always slipped me something under the table—bacon, ham, a piece of toast. I learned to chew silently so that Grandma wouldn't say, "Are you feeding the dog again?" The tone in her voice when I picked up the word "dog" suggested to me that Grandpa and I needed to keep the whole operation quiet.

I hate to see the evenin' sun go down.

We keep asking where they have gone those years we remember and we reach for them like hands in the night

What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep

I went out to the hazel wood because a fire was in my head cut and peeled a hazel wand and hooked a berry to a thread and when white moths were on the wing and moth-like stars were flickering out I dropped the berry in a stream, and caught a little silver trout.... (Song of Wandering Aengus)

The last stroke of midnight dies. All day in the one chair From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged In rambling talk with an image of air: Vague memories, nothing but memories.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep — W.B. Yeats, from "When You are Old," The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats . (Scribner; 2nd Revised edition September 9, 1996) Originally published 1889.

O bid me mount and sail up there Amid the cloudy wrack, For Peg and Meg and Paris' love That had so straight a back, Are gone away, and some that stay Have changed their silk for sack.

Shall memory restore The steps and the shore, The face and the meeting place;

Certain words now in our knowledge we will not use again, and we will never forget them. We need them. Like the back of the picture.

I have no way of telling what I miss I am the only one who misses it

When I was me I remembered I could remember what was not there but may have been there once

As those who are gone now keep wandering through our words sounds of paper following them at untold distances so I wake again in the old house where at times I have believed that I was waiting for myself and many years have gone taking with them the semblance of youth reason after reason ranges of blue hills who did I think was missing those days neither here nor there my own dog waiting to be known

What happened to the good old days of "Woman as passive recipient?" What happened to being courted? What happened to sitting back under a parasol and granting someone a chance to try to win us over?

It's never safe to be nostalgic about something until you're absolutely certain there's no chance of its coming back

These days I seem to think about the things I forgot to do for you and all the times I had a chance to.

. . . perhaps our grandsons, having never seen a wild river, will never miss the chance to set a canoe in singing waters . . . glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in.

I get a chance to observe the moon now, I still see those same images I saw when I was six, and it pleases me to know that that part of my childhood is still embedded in me.

The whole nostalgia thing, and just sticking with what you always liked and what you know and not taking a chance on something or expanding. I think especially after a certain age.

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know.

Sometimes you're just the sweetest thing. Like Christmas, summer vacation, and a brand-new puppy rolled into one.

'The Christmas Song,' by Nat King Cole, is not only a masterful performance; to me it just sounds like the holidays. I've never sung it, because Nat's version is so perfect. I gotta leave it alone.

Remembrance, like a candle, burns brightest at Christmastime.