Quotes About Nostalgia

Fella can get so he misses the noise of a saw mill

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.

help us. She likes to." "It's a long way off—clear across the country." Aron said excitedly, "I know! When we take flowers to our mother we'll take some to our Uncle Charles." And he said a little sadly, "I

We carried life out here and set it down the way those ants carry eggs. And I was the leader. The westering was as big as God, and the slow steps that made the movement piled up and piled up until the continent was crossed. "Then we came down to the sea, and it was done." He stopped and wiped his eyes until the rims were red. "That's what I should be telling instead of stories." When Jody spoke, Grandfather started and looked down at him.

Grampa an' the old place, they was jus' the same thing.

Our treasured and nostalgic picture of the village general store, the cracker-barrel store where an informed yeomanry gather to express opinions and formulate the national character, is very rapidly disappearing. People who once held family fortresses against wind and weather, against scourges of frost and drought and insect enemies, no cluster against the busy breast of the big town. (p 56)

A frightened sorrow has closed down over my heart. I wish I were a child so I could cry. I'm too old to be afraid like this. And I've not felt such despair since a bird died in my hand by a flowing water long ago

Every day my mother had tea. My dad has his ritual cigar. They had their evening cocktail. Those rituals were done nicely, with flair and feeling.

He wants to feel good, he always used to feel good at every turning of the year, every vacation or end of vacation, every new sheet on the calendar: but his adult life has proved to have no seasons, only changes of weather, and the older he gets, the less weather interests him. The house next to his old house still has the FOR SALE sign up. He tries his front door

All this saving a child does! At one point I even saved the box scores of an entire baseball season, both leagues, since Philadelphia played, haplessly, in both. How precious each scrap of the world appears, in our first years' experience of it! Slowly we realize that it is all disposable, including ourselves.

She breathed that air he'd forgotten, of high-school loveliness, come uninvited to bloom in the shadow of railroad overpasses, alongside telephone poles, within earshot of highways with battered aluminum center strips, out of mothers gone to lard and fathers ground down by gray days of work and more work, in an America littered with bottlecaps and pull-tabs and pieces of broken muffler.

What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.

Just yesterday, it seems to him, she's stopped being pretty.

They inhabit a kind of heaven, economical as a memory.

Sunshine, the old clown, rims the room.

She gives over to him her desiccated but oddly perfect smile, a smile such as flickered from the old black-and-white movie screens, coy and certain, a smile like a thread of pure melody, that when she was young must have seemed likely to lift her life far above where it eventually settled

Rabbit wipes her chin and mouth with his handkerchief and, for weeks afterward, when all is lost, will take out this handkerchief and bury his nose in it, in its scarcely detectable smell of distant ocean.

I never rewatch the great films of my favorite directors because I'm afraid they won't hold up.

He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.

While they talked they remembered the years of their youth, and each thought of the other as he had been at another time.

I myself can't go too long without real Southern fried chicken, skillet cornbread, and all the other wonderful staples of my home food.

I always felt like I was meant to have been born in another era, another time.

Growing old is unavoidable, but never growing up is possible. I believe you can retain certain things from your childhood if you protect them - certain traits, certain places where you don't let the world go.

Her past seems a span of innocuous days. And her nights? Her most dramatic recurring dream in recent nights was one in which she had difficulty opening a jar of peanut butter.