Quotes About Nostalgia

I was already feeling a kind of homesickness for a present I was still living

I slipped into a state beyond my usual grief and restlessness and anxiety and despair – one of not feeling anything at all. And when I felt nothing I almost became nostalgic for the grief; at least when you felt pain you knew you were still alive.

it isn't healthy to walk around no longer familiar streets, looking for memories that have been paved over

It is strange how close the past is, even when you imagine it to be so far away. Strange how it can just jump out of a sentence and hit you.

They talk some more, Will prompting Peter into remembering their early childhood on the barge. How their parents always went that extra mile to make their infancy special, like the time they brought a freshly killed department store Santa Clause home for their midnight Christmas feast.

The past resides inside the present, repeating hiccuping, reminding you of all the stuff that no longer is. It bleeds out from road signs and plaques on park benches and songs and surnames and faves and the covers of books.

preserved in Nora's memory like a mosquito in amber.

And it was then that Nora noticed the gun, a large rifle with a hefty brown handle, leaning against the wall at the far end of the room, under the coat hooks. The sight made her feel happy, somehow. Made her feel like her eleven-year-old self would have been proud. She was, it seemed, having an adventure.

turtle-green polo neck. She was quite old.

Extract from "That it will never come again" by Emily Dickinson reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Lyrics from THIS MUST BE THE PLACE by David Byrne. Courtesy Index Music, Inc.

Places are places and memories are memories.

Todo era bonito (y nada dolía).

Nora felt a warm glow. Not just from the pictures, which were indisputably lovely, but from the contact with Izzy.

I'm just a slow-emotion replay of somebody I used to be.

If there is no fog on the day you come home I will build a bonfire So the smoke will make the cedars look the way you like them

Are ye too changed, ye hills? See, tis no foot of unfamiliar men> Tonight from Oxford up your pathway strays! Here came I often, often, in old days; Thyrsis and I; we still had Thyrsis then.

Are ye too changed, ye hills?See, 'tis no foot of unfamiliar menTonight from Oxford up your pathway strays!Here came I often, often, in old days—Thyrsis [Arthur Hugh Clough] and I; we still had Thyrsis then.

When I hear people fondly recalling their past, I hear Death sharpening his knives.

I don't think that digital photography is romantic yet. It's not sympathetic the way that film is.

Dad jokes. You hate them when you hear them every day, but trust me, you sure do miss 'em when he's gone.

I would absolutely love to go back to the simplicity of the '80s, where there wasn't texting, social media, iPhones, or smartphones. I love the fact that you would go home and check your messages. I'm not well suited to the world of modern technology.

And yet, even as she spoke, she knew that she did not wish to come back. not to stay, not to live. She loved the little yellow cottage more than she loved any place on earth. but she was through with it except in her memories.

One strain could call up the quivering expectancy of Christmas Eve, childhood, joy and sadness, the lonely wonder of a star

My parents are there, but they are hazy figures, a tall stern-looking man in khaki shorts with green eyes, and my mother, petite and graceful, wearing a longyi, the Burmese version of the sarong, with a close-fitting jacket or blouse called an eingyi. And there are flowers in her hair, always jasmine.