Quotes About Nostalgia

Stones and bones; snow and frost; seeds and beans and polliwogs. Paths and twigs, assorted kisses, We all know who Daddy misses! His two little frogs of girls, that's who. They know where they are, do you, do you?

I suspected, however, that I wasn't homesick for anything I would find at home when I returned. The longing was for what I wouldn't find: the past and all the people and places there were lost to me.

What if more of life could be like that? Like the last slow dance, where, to echo T.S. Eliot, a lifetime burns in every moment.

What is the purpose of memory? Is it a trick to make sure we don't forget who we are by reminding us of who we were?

Mrs. Casey, do you love Christmas? Well you know, she answered reflectively, Christmas can be a sad time for people too. It's a remembering time for us older ones. We remember the people who are gone. Oh, I never thought of that, I told her in surprise. Well that's youth for you, she said; you don't start to look back over your shoulder until there is something to look back at, and around Christmas I tend to think of the Christmases past and the people gone with them.

I always remember your own grandmother, she continued, nodding her head, old Mrs. Taylor. She died on a Christmas Night. Oh, I said shivering. I wouldn't like to die on a Christmas Night. A good night to die, she smiled; they say that the gates of heaven are open on Christmas Night.

He did not use these things anymore, and yet, the thought of letting them go made him sad. He felt they represented times in his life he could not recall without their presence. They represented stories

Y es que hace mucho tiempo que no pienso en los muchachos. Y en los hombres no he pensado nunca.

It's true that he didn't kill himself until I was nearly twenty. But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb. He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence steaming off the wallpaper, digging up the dogwoods, polishing the finials... smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.

My mother must have bathed me hundreds of times. But it's my father rinsing me off with the purple metal cup that I remember most clearly. The suffusion of warmth as the hot water sluiced over me... ...the sudden, unbearable cold of its absence.

was the one who was left behind who did most of the missing.

You're a throwback. To what? Jess considered this. Hi-tech at work, Emily was paradoxically old-fashioned in her life. She didn't even own a television. The nineteenth century, Jess concluded. No. Eighteenth. You can be eighteenth. I'll be nineteenth. I never pictured you as a Victorian. No, early nineteenth century, said Jess, who had always been a stickler when it came to imaginary games and books. The Blue Fairy, not Tinker Bell. Lucy, not Susan. Jo, not Amy. Austen, not the Brontes.

Jess herself had not eaten fowl or roast or even fish in years, but the books awakened memories of turkey and thick gravy, and crab cakes, and rib-eye roasts. Redolent of smoke and flame, the recipes repelled and also reminded her of pink and tender meat, and breaking open lobster dripping with sweet butter, and sucking marrow out of the bones.

was about ten years old. It was called The Geek.

America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.

Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!

I eat a catfish sandwich with onions and red sauce 20c. (Havana 1953)

34 coming up — I suddenly felt old — sitting with Walter & Raquel in Chinese Restaurant — they kissed — I alone — age of Burroughs when we first met.

But you never feel things so deeply—so strongly—as you do in high school. You

Sometimes, for a moment, everything is just as you need it to be. The memories of such moments live in the heart, waiting for the time you need to think of them, if only to remind yourself that for a short while, everything had been fine, and might be so again.

There's something uncomfortable about looking at pictures of your parents at a time when they made each other happy.

Nostalgia was becoming a favoured hobby of his. Strange, how the best moments of our lives we scarcely notice except in looking back.

Comes to be everything reminds you of something past. Somewhere past. Someone. Yourself, maybe, how you were. The now gets fainter and the past more and more real. The future worn down to but a stub.

It is easy to speak of the past, impossible to go there.