Quotes About Nostalgia

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

I end not far from my going forth By picking the faded blue Of the last remaining aster flower To carry again to you.

A Late Walk - A Tree beside the wall stands bare, But a leaf that lingered brown, Disturbed, I doubt not, by my thought, comes softly rattling down. I end not far from my going forth By picking the faded blue Of the last remaining aster flower to carry again to you.

And on the worn book of old-golden I brought not here to read, it seems, but hold And freshen in this air of withering sweetness;

I end not far from my going forth By picking the faded blue 15 Of the last remaining aster flower To carry again to you.

I know what I really want for Christmas. I want my childhood back. Nobody is going to give me that. I might give at least the memory of it to myself if I try. I know it doesn't make sense, but since when is Christmas about sense, anyway? It is about a child, of long ago and far away, and it is about the child of now. In you and me. Waiting behind the door of or hearts for something wonderful to happen. A child who is impractical, unrealistic, simpleminded and terribly vulnerable to joy.

Revisiting the music of one's youth is part of the reunion with self. Whatever your parents may have thought of the music, however the music may survive the test of time, if it was the music you listened to in high school or college days, then it plays forever in some ballroom of your mind. You can still mouth the words and do the dances.

You'd like my grandfather. And he'd like you, I think. Happy Grandfather's Day to him, wherever he is. If you see him, let him take you out to see the stars some night. And tell him I said I'd really like it if he came home for Christmas.

Once beyond the village, where the cottages ceased abruptly, on either side of the road they could smell through the darkness the friendly fields again; and they braced themselves for the last long stretch, the home stretch, the stretch that we know is bound to end, some time, in the rattle of the door-latch, the sudden firelight, and the sight of familiar things greeting us as long-absent travelers from far oversea.

here am I, footsore and hungry, tramping away from it, tramping southward, following the old call, back to the old life, THE life which is mine and which will not let me go.

as one by one the scents and sounds and names of long-forgotten places come gradually back and beckon to us.

and I shall keep a pony-chaise to jog about the country in, just as I used to in the good old days, before I got restless, and

So beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever.

And the home had been happy with him, too, evidently, and was missing him, and wanted him back, and was telling him so, through his nose, sorrowfully, reproachfully, but with no bitterness or anger; only with plaintive reminder that it was there, and wanted him.

As the weather held that fall Louis often walked out at night past her house and looked at the light shining upstairs in her bedroom, her bedside lamp that he knew and the room with its big bed and dark wooden dresser and the bathroom located down the hall, and remembered everything about the room and the nights lying in the dark talking and the closeness of it all.

FORTY YEARS AGO

Regie Gibson said, "Our problem as Americans is we actually hate history. . . . What we love is nostalgia. We love to remember things exactly the way they didn't happen. History itself is often an indictment. And people? We hate to be indicted.

But why did he remember only the things in life that had hurt him? Why couldn't he remember the things that had given him joy or caused him to smile: the jokes he had heard, the songs that had made him lift his arms in the air, the people who had loved him, whose cheeks he had touched with his fingers?

He feels the way he used to feel passing love notes to girls in elementary school. Do you like me? the notes always read. Check yes or no. But he is older now and his question is older, too, not Do you like me? but Shouldn't someone?

There were moments where I could make her laugh so unselfconsciously that she felt like a child again, expanding into her past as she was moving into her future.

Sometimes, driving past restaurants that had once been other restaurants, big box stores that had once been wood lots and houses, I imagined that if I could just make the right set of turns, the city would unlock for me, and my car would carry me into the roads of fifteen years ago.

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.

I didn't remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become.

I wanted to tell them that, in Kabul, we snapped a tree branch and used it as a credit card. Hassan and I would take the wooden stick to the bread maker. He'd carve notches on our stick with his knife, one notch for each loaf of naan he'd pull for us from the tandoor's roaring flames. At the end of the month, my father paid him for the number of notches on the stick. That was it. No questions. No ID.