Quotes About Nostalgia

It was the summer when fireflies showed up in Saint-Malo, and their father was very excited, building long-handled nets for his boys and giving them jars with wire to fasten over the tops, and Etienne and Henri raced through the tall grass as the fireflies floated away from them, illuming on and off, always seeming to rise just beyond their reach, as if the earth were smoldering and these were sparks that their footfalls had prodded free.

Ah," he says, more quietly, his accent fading, the faintest touch of dread returning to his voice, "here we are. Home.

Todo dia, ela tira um tempo para se perder nos reinos da memória...

Then the women start up again, scheming, and gabbling. Madame Manec brushes Marie-Laure's hair in long absentminded strokes. "Seventy-six years old," she whispers, "and I can still feel like this? Like a little girl with stars in her eyes?

The world had become like an exhibit at Ward's museum: pretty and nostalgic and watered down, something old and sealed off you weren't allowed to touch. - Pg. 204

she gazed at places but could not enter them, witnessed beauty but could not experience it. It was as though she had been excised neatly out of each moment. The world had become like an exhibit at Ward's museum: pretty and nostalgic and watered down, something old and sealed off you weren't allowed to touch.

Words fail us. They are like keys: they open, but they also shut. When we were small and could hardly raise ourselves from the floor, we curled our fingers around the fingers of mother and father, and we looked into their faces as they looked into ours. Where is the word for that?

remembering his great-uncle and his affection for him, Octavius burst into tears.

I remember a moment when the Prince went back to his old school, Grammar School in Melbourne, and slightly to his horror his old music teacher produced a cello.

A Meeting In a dream I meet my dead friend. He has, I know, gone long and far, and yet he is the same for the dead are changeless. They grow no older. It is I who have changed, grown strange to what I was. Yet I, the changed one, ask: "How you been?" He grins and looks at me. "I been eating peaches off some mighty fine trees.

Well, everyone likes movies when they're a little kid.

Why does anyone take photographs ever? We never look at them anymore.

The food at the Mandarin Club was not good, but the members liked it that way. It reminded them of school.

You know the mistake I made tonight ? It was believing in you. Well, Mr James Bond 007, whatever you were is gone. It belongs to another time. There are no more heroes any more.

It was an Édith Piaf album, Chansons Parisiennes.

What Abbott represented was completely at odds with everything I would enjoy writing about: blue telephone boxes, beaches and fortifications, seagulls, miniature steak and kidney puddings, ginger-haired taxi drivers.

ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL! I wish they'd had books like this when I was young…

That's the thing about books. They stay with you for life.

There were even proper cloth serviettes in metal rings. Who does that anymore? What's wrong with a square of kitchen roll?

metrosexual for this folly? This was where he had died. I was reminded

It's like that poem Larkin wrote. "I have started to say 'A quarter of a century'/ Or 'thirty years back' /About my own life/It makes me breathless…

I grew up abroad, and when I first passed through London in the 1970s, it seemed a drab and provincial place.

Grandpa Keith made shoes for Adam Faith and George Best. I was dazzled by such people. As a teenager, I was haunted by the idea of people living glamorously beyond my provincial horizons.

To my mind, it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder.