Quotes About Nostalgia

Chère Méditerranée ! Que ta sagesse latine, si douce à la vie, me fut donc clémente et amicale, et avec quelle indulgence ton vieux regard amusé s'est posé sur mon front d'adolescent ! Je reviens toujours à ton bord, avec les barques qui ramènent le couchant dans leurs filets. J'ai été heureux sur ces galets.

I guess I'm only talking about my childhood. Things that become part of you when you're a child and then you grow up and somehow they don't—and that's how you never get to be a mature person, an adult, with those naïve beliefs in you that never grew up . . .

When Christophe at last made up his mind to go to bed, chilled in body and soul, he heard the window below him shut. And, as he lay, he thought sadly that it is cruel for the poor to dwell on the past, for they have no right to have a past, like the rich: they have no home, no corner of the earth wherein to house their memories: their joys, their sorrows, all their days, are scattered in the wind.

It's not that we have to quit this life one day, it's how many things we have to quit all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, music, the physics of falling leaves, vanilla and jasmine, poppies, smiling, anthills, the color of the sky, coffee and cashmere, literature, sparks and subway trains... If only one could leave this life slowly!

When she was a child, my love carried a road-map in her hand the way other girls carried handkerchiefs.

I thought of the fifteen years I lived 'sans papiers' in France and how Paris had belonged to me. I was like a king in France. And now that suddenly I was French, Paris was gone for me. I had abdicated the throne the French people had given to me. All those people were gone. The whole city had changed. I left for five years: three spent wandering in Europe, while two years I spent living in Muslim Morocco; and now Paris had changed and there was no going back.

A later age looks back with nostalgia at an earlier one and depicts it in terms of ideals and activities now receding.

I'm not Nat. I'm Nat's Garbage Service. That is, I'm the only surviving member." "A music group?" "The music group," said the old man. "We got the Grammy in 1972. You wouldn't remember our big ones I guess. Flowers Growing In The Cracks and Fragmented Syntaptic Authenticated Hallucinogenic Anthrax?

never had one when I was a kid." She pointed with her free hand. "Over that way. No, over there actually. Over there across the Bay is Oakland. You know where 7th and Central is?" "No." "Good for you then. That is where I grew up, in that vicinity. Now I'm practically a superstar.

99 percent of every beautiful thing you ever knew escaped and went back out into the world where you vaguely remembered it.

her lower lip was like an orange mint. and i was a crying little boy in the candy store.

It struck her how eating was a comfort during a hard time because it reminded you that there had been other days, good days, when you'd eaten the same thing. Reminded you there were good days in life, when precious little else did. (268)

We had some good times at school. I didn't know how good those times was till I left, but I guess that's the way of it

The joke in our family is that we can cry reading the phone book.

The memory of odors is very rich. Now

I ended up with forty acres; I ended up with a broken fiddle-- And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories, and not a sin- gle regret.

Her voice harkening to the period of her heels -- Louis XV.

With each butterfly´s arrival, there´s a chance for me to be the adult incarnation of the little girl in the picture book I once loved.

It all came back. Every bone in my body turned hot. Then I couldn't make it stop. All those memories. Whatever kept them stored away broke. There was a rush of sensation through me, then nothing. And for days afterward, I'd get overwhelmed with a sound or the way my shirt rubbed against my arm or a smell. Like my body remembered and reminded the rest of me.

As we walked past a quad bike chained to a farm gate, he remarked "It's such a pity how times have changed. You can't leave a piece of machinery out on the road any more." He seemed to have forgotten that he had just been describing a time when you couldn't leave you cattle out.

La vida es un pequeño espacio de luz entre dos nostalgias: la de lo que aún no has vivido y la de lo que ya no vas a poder vivir. Y el momento justo de la acción es tan confuso, tan resbaladizo y tan efímero que lo desperdicias mirando con aturdimiento alrededor.

young woman was so true to the little girl who had sometimes

Still, now and then they seemed to be holding behind them the surprising, the magic vistas of childhood - the sudden snow at night, whirling and furring without sound against the window; the full moon and all its shadows on the lawn; the Christmas sleigh and reindeer in the sky.

She remembered him smiling, and realized that time, that great old healer, had finally accomplished its work, and now, across the years, the face of love no longer stirred up agonies of grief and bitterness. Rather, one was left feeling simply grateful. For how unimaginably empty the past would be without him to remember.