Quotes About Nostalgia

I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me.

In fact, I can't think of much I'd like better than for him to step into the room right now, glasses fogged and smelling of damp wool, shaking the rain from his hair like an old dog and saying: 'Dickie, my boy, what you got for a thirsty old man to drink tonight?

Out on the lawn, Bunny had just knocked Henry's ball about seventy feet outside the court. There was a ragged burst of laughter; faint, but clear, it floated back across the evening air. That laughter haunts me still.

But I am getting sentimental. Sometimes, when I think about these things, I do.

a light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books, and silence.

And though there was something pathetic about it—taking comfort in her left-behind things like a puppy snuggled in an old coat...

Even now I remember those pictures, like pictures in a storybook one loved as a child. Radiant meadows, mountains vaporous in the trembling distance; leaves ankle-deep on a gusty autumn road; bonfires and fog in the valleys; cellos, dark window-panes, snow.

She raised up on tiptoe and gave me a cool, soft kiss that tasted of Popsicles. Oh you, I though, my heart beating fast and shallow.

honestly can't remember much else about those years

Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her – to freeze her in my mind so I wouldn't forget her – but instead of birthdays and happy times I kept remembering things like how a few days before she was killed she'd stopped me halfway out the door to pick a thread off my school jacket.

or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.

It made me think of the nice old Marimekko-clad ladies I sometimes went to see in the Ritz Tower: gravel-voiced, turban-wearing, panther-braceleted widows looking to move to Miami, their apartments filled with smoked-glass and chromed-steel furniture that, in the seventies, they'd purchased through their decorators for the price of a good Queen Anne--but (I was responsible for telling them, reluctantly) had not held its value and could not be re-sold at even half what they'd bought it for.

light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.

The light of long ago is different from the light of today and yet here, in this house, I'm reminded of the past at every turn.

While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years.

Then again: there was not exactly a word for Boris and me... It was just about drowsy air-conditioned afternoons, lonely and drunk, blinds closed against the glare, empty sugar packets and dried-up orange peels strewn on the carpet, Dear Prudence from the White Album (which Boris adored) or else the same mournful old Radiohead over and over...

It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone.

fact it seemed we had been doing things, such as stringing necklaces of rainbow-colored candy while the radio played Belle and Sebastian

Cinnamon-colored walls, rain on the windowpanes, vast quiet and a sense of depth and distance, like the varnish over the background of a nineteenth-century paintings. Rugs worn to threads, painted Japanese fans and antique valentines flickering in candlelight, Pierrots and doves and flowergarlanded hearts.

The chronological sorting of memories is an interesting business

The light of long ago is different from the light of today, and yet here, in this house, I'm reminded of the past at every turn.

and though it's a bleak thing to admit all these years later, still I've never met anyone who made me feel loved the way she did.

Yet every time I remembered it I was suffused with a glow of warmth.

And the flavor of Pippa's kiss- bittersweet and strange- stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.