Quotes About Nostalgia

I shall die as I have lived, surrounded by bric-a-brac, sold by weight among the postscripts added to lost things.

A happy past in whose remembrance I would also be happy, with nothing in the present that would cheer or even interest me, with no dream or possibility of a future that could be any different from this present or have a past other than this past! – here lies my life, a conscious ghost of a paradise I never knew, a stillborn corpse of my unrealized hopes.

Every part of me is a vague nostalgia neither for the past nor for the future: the whole of me is a nostalgia for the anonymous, prolix, unfathomable present.

The sweetness of the past? Our memory of it, since to remember it is to make it present, and it isn't present nor ever can be – absurdity, my love, absurdity.

La dulzura del pasado? El recordarlo, puesto que recordarlo es hacerlo presente y no lo es ni ya lo puede ser —el absurdo, mi amor, el absurdo.

Ah, my dead childhood! A corpse ever alive in my breast!

I have in me like a haze Which holds and which is nothing A nostalgia for nothing at all, The desire for something vague. — Fernando Pessoa, opening lines to "[I have in me like a haze]," trans. Richard Zenith, Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems (Grove Press, 1998)

Dormir (...) Una nada con respiración por fuera, una muerte leve de la que se despierta con nostalgia y frescor, un ceder los tejidos del alma al masaje del olvido.

What I was and will never be again! What I had and will never have again!

Vivemos só de recordar. Na nossa alma entristecida Há um som de reza a invocar A morta vida;

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world's existence.

The beauty of ruins? That they're no longer good for anything.

So many times, so many, like now, it has oppressed me to feel myself feel – to feel anguish just because it's a feeling, restlessness because I'm here, nostalgia for something I've never known, the sunset of all emotions, myself yellowing, subdued to grey sadness in my external selfawareness.

I feel nostalgia for the possibility of one day feeling nostalgia, regardless of how absurd that nostalgia may seem.

Ah, no hay nostalgia más dolorosa que la de las cosas que nunca han sucedido!

I CARRY inside my heart, As in a chest too full to shut, All the places where I have been, All the ports at which I have called, All the sights I've seen through windows and portholes And from quarterdecks, dreaming. And all of this, which is so much, is nothing next to what I want. — Fernando Pessoa, Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems . (Grove Press; First Printing edition April 1, 1999)

When I was little I didn't know I'd grow up. Or I knew but didn't feel it. Time at that age doesn't exist. Each day it's the same kitchen table With the same backyard outside, And sadness, when felt, Is sadness, but you aren't sad.

Neste momento vem-me uma vaga saudade E um vago desejo plácido Que aparece e desaparece.   Também às vezes, à flor dos ribeiros, Formam-se bolhas na água Que nascem e se desmancham E não têm sentido nenhum Salvo serem bolhas de água Que nascem e se desmancham.

To be a retired major seems to me ideal. Too bad it's not possible to have eternally been nothing but a retired major.

O diabo desta vida é que entre cem caminhos temos que escolher apenas um, e viver com a nostalgia dos outros noventa e nove.

as she watched her friend disappear down the sleepy street of dusty sunshine...

still loved but deprived of grace

When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.

Anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his life.