Quotes About Nostalgia

How queer to think that the old lady in the black military cloak was the Miss Milly who went to the dancing class! It makes me wonder what I shall be like when I am old.

I go backwards and forwards, recapturing the past, wondering about the future—and, most unreasonably, I find myself longing for the past more than for the future.

How indescribable the scent of autumn flowers was– barely a scent at all, really; just a faint, strange smell, pleasant but sad. Could a smell be sad or was it just the association with the dying summer?

the old towns in the South where queer grey moss hangs from the trees...

I was going to give the farewell call – a farewell for ever this time, not just for a year. The call is a queer wordless cry made up of all the vowel sounds - and it was thrilling when Rose and I used to make it together, but I do it fairly well by myself. 'Ayieou!' I called - and it echoed back from the castle walls as I knew it would.

Our Clare doesn't much care for real life,' Drew told Jane. 'What she needs is to live in a book– the kind that no longer gets written.

Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is, 'I know this feeling. I was here before.

Murray said, 'I don't trust anybody's nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.

Years after I'd seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed after a sleepy pee and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to, one dim mist of railroad rooms and certain figures reappear, borderline ghosts.

It is all falling indelibly into the past.

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.

How memory conspires with objects of human craft, pressing time flat, inciting a tender reminiscence.

There was something touching about the fact that Murray was dressed almost totally in corduroy.

We travel into or away from our photographs.

The falling away of things we carry around with us, twilight and chimney smoke.

There may be as many people taking pictures as there are brides and grooms. One of them for every one of us. Clickety-click. The thought makes the couples a little giddy. They feel that space is contagious. They are here but also there, already in albums and slide projectors, filling picture frames with their microcosmic bodies, the minikin selves they are trying to become.

People getting older become more fond of objects. I think this is true. Particular things. A leather-bound book, a piece of furniture, a photograph, a painting, the frame that holds the painting. These things make the past seem permanent. A baseball signed by a famous player, long dead. A simple coffee mug. Things we trust. They tell an important story. A person's life, all those who entered and left, there's a depth, a richness.

I'll tell you what I long for, the days of disarray, when I didn't give a damn or a fuck or a farthing.

Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It's a settling of grievances between the present and the past.

Te lo ricordi com'era, sudare sotto le coperte, da bambini? La febbre è una cosa segreta. È come cadere in un buco dove nessuno può seguirti, ma non provi né paura né dolore perché non ti senti neanche te stesso. Io adoro raggomitolarmi nel sudore.

We listen to the old radio shows. Light flares and spreads across the blue-banded edge, sunrise, sunset, the urban grids in shadow. There is a sweetness in the tenor voice of the young man singing, a simple vigour that time and distance and random noise have enveloped in eloquence and yearning. Every sound, every lilt of strings has this veneer of age.

Then she rubbed the cat's fur and felt her childhood there. It was complete in a touch, everything intact, carried out of old lost houses and fields and summer days into the river of her hand.

We can't do justice to our dreams, reworking them in memory. They seem borrowed, part of another life, ours only maybe and only in the farthest margins.