Quotes About Nostalgia

Do you recall a time when the income of a single schoolteacher or baker or salesman or mechanic was enough to buy a home, have two cars, and raise a family?

Central Park is the grandiose symbol of the front yard each child in New York hasn't got.

All at once she could hear the sullen patter of the rain and sense the sigh of the wind behind it. She remembered the sound, because it had rained like that the day Mom was buried, the day they lowered her into that little rectangle of darkness.

There is a child in every one of us who is still a trick-or-treater looking for a brightly-lit front porch.

Say what you want about aging, it's still the only way to have old friends.

A child on a farm sees a plane fly overhead and dreams of a faraway place. A traveler on the plane sees the farmhouse below and dreams of home.

In childhood, we press our nose to the pane, looking out. In memories of childhood, we press our nose to the pane, looking in.

In the happiest of our childhood memories, our parents were happy, too.

You can be sad recalling sad times, but if you really want to be sad, recall happy times.

Stored away in some brain cell is the image of a long-departed aunt you haven't thought of in 30 years. Stored away in another cell is the image of a pink pony stitched on your first set of baby pajamas. All it takes to get that aunt mounted on the back of that pony is to eat a hunk of meatloaf immediately before going to bed.

When you have brought up kids, there are memories you store directly in your tear ducts.

At my age, you not only have bittersweet memories, you make bittersweet plans.

I find in old age that it's possible to revisit the past, the one requirement being that you come as you are.

Looking back on a happy life, one realizes that one was not happy all the time.

The happiest memories are of moments that ended when they should have.

An old woman looks in a mirror, recalls a little girl with a rag doll, and wonders what became of the little girl.

Life is a series of family photos in which eventually you stop showing up.

In childhood, we yearn to be grown-ups. In old age, we yearn to be kids. It just seems that all would be wonderful if we didn't have to celebrate our birthdays in chronological order.

Perhaps we are given a mom that we might take into death the memory of a lullaby.

It's curious the way we get nostalgic for some hoped-for thing that never happened, as if something that never happened were in the past.

I would love to go back and travel the road not taken, if I knew at the end of it I'd find the same set of grandkids.

'Twas here we loved in sunnier days and greener; And now, in this disconsolate decay, I come to see her where I most have seen her, And touch the happier day.

Dear dead women, with such hair, too—what's become of all the goldUsed to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.

You can take us out of Arcadia, but you cannot take Arcadia out of us." Nicholas D. Kokonis, psychologist and author of Arcadia, My Arcadia and Out of Arcadia: The American Odyssey of Angelo Vlahos