Quotes About Nostalgia

Summertime, I think, is a collective unconscious. We all remember the notes that made up the song of the ice-cream man; we all know what it feels like to brand our thighs on a playground slide that's heated up like a knife in a fire; we all have lain on our backs with our eyes closed and our hearts beating across the surface of our lids, hoping that this day will stretch just a little longer than the last one, when in fact it's all going the other direction

I think it is a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. —Vladimir Nabokov

What I want, more than anything, is to turn back time a little. To become the kid I used to be, who believed whatever my mother said was one hundred percent true and right without looking hard enough to see the hairline cracks.

When Thomas left, it was with the feeling of a summer romance—a trinket that I could take out and examine for the rest of my life, the same way I might save a seashell from a beach vacation or the ticket from my first Broadway musical.

I won't forget you, Olive. No matter how hard I may try. That's not the same as being remembered. Isn't it?

If you ask me, music is the language of memories.

sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you're alone. It feels less like a wound, more like a poultice.

I wonder if, as you get older, you stop missing people so fiercely. Maybe growing up is just focusing on what you've got, instead of what you don't

I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them.

green T-Bird. When

when you held one of those volumes in your hands you were leafing through another person's life. Someone else had once loved that story, too. Someone else had carried that book in a backpack, devoured it over breakfast, mopped up that coffee stain at a Paris café, cried herself to sleep after the last chapter. The scent of their store was distinctive: a slight damp mildew, a pinch of dust. To me, it was the smell of history.

And afterward, when the leaves turned and the snow came, every now and then I would rise in everyone's minds like a tide.

the breeze would draw a violin bow across the branches of a tree and I would again hear her lullaby. I would listen to the chime of coins being counted, and I would imagine her laughter. Her voice was caught in the shell of my ear, as if it were the ocean.

Nobody's birthday.

My life is moving forward in a weird empty narrative, missing one key character, whose current life is a continuous loop.

So maybe there is a place in your life you wear out like a rut, or even better, like the soft spot on the couch. And no matter what else happens to you, you come back to that.

Logically, I understand that it wasn't Edward's fault my family fell apart after he left. But when you're eleven years old, you don't give a fuck about logic. You just really miss holding your big brother's hand.

Appeals to the Young and the Young at Heart.

But I remember another image from Earth: the rich dark green grass that grew in graveyards.

Maybe, he thinks, as he's riding on through the snow, maybe this is why she's leaving. Maybe she fell in love with me when we were kids. And now: and now: and now: we're not kids anymore.

Those days were like a crown of gold over her head. Her hair was a knotted nest of some tiny white and yellow flowers with little bluebells wrapped inside her curls. Maybe she'd bring him a sandwich or a bottle of Coca-Cola, all cold and full of beads of ice along the side. Wasn't it all so pretty? Wasn't it all so nice?

I really like those old shows. I've decided the way to know you're becoming an old fogey is when the only shows you like are sponsored by Depends, the Scooter Store, and Viagra.

We are wholly alone in the evening gloom. And my fingers are warm like the lost days of June. — Joseph Brodsky, from "Evening," Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems , trans. George L. Kline (Harper & Row, 1973)

The most beautiful thing of all, though, is to be able to shake hands again with an old friend, as in days gone by; it is a great comfort to find again, what we have treasured.