Quotes About Nostalgia

The broad daylight of habitual memory gradually fades our images of the past, wears them away until nothing is left of them and the past becomes irrecoverable.

this early Swann in whom I can distinguish the charming mistakes of my childhood, and who, incidentally, is less like his successor than he is like the other people I knew at that time, as though one's life were a series of galleries in which all the portraits of any one period had a marked family likeness, the same (so to speak) tonality

At last, in Albertine walking with the lady in gray down the little street that led to the bath-house, I saw before my eyes a fragment of that past which seemed to me no less mysterious and terrifying than I had feared when I imagined it enclosed within Albertine's eyes and within her memories.

Hello darkness, my old friend. I've come to talk with you again

Marcella recalls in her writings and interviews that she had very little interest in food growing up, but did have vivid memories of her tiny grandmother standing on a crate, rolling pasta into silky sheets that were almost as big as a bedspread.

Everything had a sweetness these days, a golden glow like he was watching his own life in some sun-faded movie print.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

They went back to looking straight ahead. A row of bottles lined the back of the bar, and behind them faded snapshots had been tacked up in a collage.

of smiling strangers hanging on each other, holding up beer bottles, all of them seeming to be having a great time. He wondered how old the photos were

Mormor did. My father had brought our frying pan from home

from ages seven through thirteen I felt a kind of age-loyalty to characters [ Out of the Garden ].

The past is a closed door.

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back. Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

The beauty of the past belongs to the past.

But it is pleasant to be remembered in England.

Whose memories are these? Who speaks to her of this gentle time that she is too young to have known herself? There was hardship then, certainly, but not hearts chained and heavy with fear. Who is it that laughs with aged lightheartedness and suggests that this is still a place of promise?

Bread and dripping, Dorothy had mentioned. You couldn't offer that to man or boy now, not because they wouldn't eat it, although they wouldn't, but because meat doesn't produce dripping any more. The meat isn't real meat any more. Even when it looks like meat, it's something else.

So we troop out to the coast, and every time we meet someone from back home we fall on their necks and weep. Stupid, eh? Neither of them think it is stupid. You Can't Go Home Again, said Thomas Wolfe. Morag wonders now if it may be the reverse which is true. You have to go home again, in some way or other.

The glories of the past compensated for the imperfections of the present.

Lei ansima, il collo torto verso il soffitto rotto, e lui la guarda. E forse la guardava così, con la stessa tenerezza, la stessa nostalgia, mentre facevano l'amore.

but when she looked into his eyes, those dark velvet brown eyes, Arabella saw something of tenderness. And for all that she should have known better, for all of her common sense, she felt the stirrings of old feelings that she had thought never to feel again.