Quotes About Nostalgia

After the chicken is fried and wrapped in wax paper, tucked gently into cardboard shoe boxes and tied with string... After the corn bread is cut into wedges, the peaches washed and dried... After the sweet tea is poured into mason jars twisted tight and the deviled eggs are scooped back inside their egg-white beds slipped into porcelain bowls that are my mother's now, a gift her mother sends with her on the journey...

And when she says, I love you, too the South is so heavy in her mouth my eyes fill up with the missing of everything and everyone I've ever known.

I held on to my mama's Spelman College sweater. Wore it the first day I got there myself and still have it now. Held on to my own daddy's stethoscope until I pulled it out of its black leather case one winter and saw the rubber had melted into sticky pieces of nothing and the silver disk was flaked with rust. Seems all I had from them was the memories of fire and smoke.

the South is so heavy in her mouth my eyes fill up with the missing of everything and everyone I've ever known.

You know what, Daddy? What you got for me, Melody? This place feels like from a long time ago. It feels like it's in the past tense.

Even if you turn your back on the world you left, you're still pulled toward it, you're still turning around--always--to look behind you. To make sure everyone's okay.

They ate bologna-and-cheese sandwiches, barbecue potato chips, and Oreo cookies sitting on the library steps. Washing it down with Coca-Cola. Years later, Iris wouldn't remember what they talked about as they ate, but she'd remember CathyMarie's laughter, the shape and warmth of her calloused hands.

Feels like a long time ago, but not so far in the past that I don't remember the way that Chicago cold slipped past your bones, I swear. That wind coming off the water? What?!

The green of Tennessee faded quickly into the foreign world of Brooklyn, heat rising from cement. I thought of my mother often, lifting my hand to stroke my own cheek, imagining her beside me, explaining this newness, the fast pace of it, the impenetrable gray of it. When my brother cried, I shushed him, telling him not to worry. She's coming soon, I said, trying to echo her. She's coming tomorrow. And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

In Tennessee, honeysuckle vines bloomed thick and full in our yard every summer. My brother and I ran out in the early hours, barefooted and still in pajamas to suck the sweetness from the bright flowers. It was never enough. That faint hint of honeysuckle on the tongue an almost broken promise of something better hidden somewhere deeper.

There's a strange sensation - you recall it from childhood - about sleeping in the afternoon. You rise into a different world from the one in which you lay down. The shadows have been rearranged. There's a sensation of sad sweetness, as if something has been overlooked. I used to feel it coming out of the movies just before dinnertime, after the matinee. How, I wondered, did Broadway actors face it, this bittersweet sense of time's slipping past.

Le cirque est reparti, laissant un rond dans l'herbe Et puis moi je suis seule et je tourne dedans Je tourne comme un vieux cheval. Adieu, superbe, adieu vorace instant quand nous marchions ardents.

My blood is become water; youth is frozen into senility; all things worth while are gone.

A thin, firm, crackling ficelle (a skinny loaf of French bread) with a bar of dark chocolate works like a madeleine for me, taking me back to my youth and the French quatre heure, or small snack,

You can't escape the taste of the food you had as a child. In times of stress, what do you dream about? Your mother's clam chowder. It's security, comfort. It brings you home.

XVe arrondissement possesseur sans doute d'un reste de latinité un viel homme sourit rue e la Croix-Nivert devant la devanture du magasin de lingerie féminine "IN FINE".

It reminds me of those carefree days in elementary school," Adam said, taking a sop of milk. "Where the only thing you worried about was being first on the swings, or being picked last for kickball.

Te quiero como se quiere a ciertos amores, a la antigua, con el alma y sin mirar atrás

In the past, the thought of being in my present situation had been a comfort, but now I did not even have this to look forward to, and so I lay down on my bed and dreamt I was eating a bowl of pink mullet and green figs cooked in coconut milk, and it had been cooked by my grandmother, which was why the taste of it pleased me so, for she was the person I liked best in all the world and those were the things I like best to eat also.

The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.

Carry me back to old Virginny,There's where the cotton and the corn and taters grow;There's where the birds warble sweet in the springtime,There's where this old darky's heart am longed to go.

We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.

How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. So far, so much between, you can never go home again. You can go home, it's good to go home, but you never really get all the way home again in your life. And what's it all for? All I tried to be, all I ever wanted and went away for, what's it all for?

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all.