Quotes About Nostalgia

It would be fun to do a reunion show. I hope we do it some day, but it better be soon. We're all getting on.

If aught of oaten stop or pastoral songMay hope, O pensive Eve, to soothe thine ear.

What peaceful hours I once enjoy'd!How sweet their memory still!But they have left an aching voidThe world can never fill.

In those days kitchen matches were heavy-duty implementsmore like signal flares than the weedy sticks we get today. You could strike them on any hard surface and fling them at least fifteen feet and they wouldnt go out. Indeed, even when being beaten vigorously with two hands, as when lodged on the front of ones sweater, they seemed positively determined not to fail.

You don't really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around–and why his parents will always wave back.

What matters it, O breeze, If now has come the spring When I have lost them both The garden and my nest?

There are times in the lives of most of us when we would have given all the world to be as we were but yesterday, though that yesterday had passed over us unappreciated and unenjoyed.

He went through the back door into the long narrow kitchen, feeling as he always did the sudden onslaught of time, enthralled by the myriad smells of the kitchen: coffee and cloves and cinnamon, the heavy fruity odor of basketed apples and the faintly sour smell of dried peaches, and some other odor, rich and dark and mysterious, that was the odor of time itself, of days the old woman had stacked into years as carefully as a mason lays one stone atop another to construct a wall.

She suddenly heard a wave of sound, cicadas and whippoorwills and crickets that just abruptly assailed her, and she wondered if they'd just begun or if they had already been calling and all she'd heard was the banjo music, ancient and myth-laden and somehow enticing, like sound seeping through the cracks of a place you couldn't get to anymore

When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well.

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.

When I was your age, television was called books.

Those hundreds of feet were light. In washing them off, I pretended the hose was a pump. What have I missed? Childhood is a lie of poetry.

it is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.

Birthdays, like weddings, anniversaries, baptisms, bar mitzvahs, wakes, are occasions to retie family ties, renew family feuds, restore family feeling, add to family lore, tribalize the psyche, generate guilt, exercise power, wave a foreign flag, talk in tongues, exchange lies, remember dates and the old days, to be fond of how it was, be angry at what it should be, and weep at why it isn't.

My feathered friends were so much to me that I am constantly tempted to make this sketch of my first years a book about birds and little else.

As always, we two have fallen to reminiscing of Blossom Prairie and our life there before my father died, telling stories by the hour which both of us have heard and told so often now that it is the rhythm which stirs us more than the words, our tongues thickening steadily until the accent is barely intelligible to my Yankee wife, who listens amused, amazed, bewildered, bored, and sometimes appalled.

In the words of classicist Jennifer Wise, "With little exaggeration, it could be said that the entirety of the Odyssey ultimately boils down to one simple technological problem: the epic hero's inability to write home."35

Same old slippers,Same old rice,Same old glimpse ofParadise.

It made me think that no matter how big we grew or how old, there was always a child in us somewhere.

Although I'd had no trouble looking at the casket the day before, on that Saturday I did my best to keep my eyes averted. I stared instead at the stained-glass window behind the altar and imagined shooting the panes out with a slingshot.

my mother heated Campbell's tomato soup and made grilled cheese sandwiches with Velveeta and we ate dinner and afterward watched Have Gun—Will Travel.

Smells are the time machines of human perception. A scent can take you instantly back to a particular place and time.

We piled into the car, a 1955 Packard Clipper the color of canned peas that my mother had named Lizzie.