Quotes About Nostalgia

that music is a total constant. That's why we have such a strong visceral connection to it, you know? Because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person. No matter what else has changed in you or the world, that one song stays the same, just like that moment.

The past was always present, in its way, and you can't help but remember. Even if you can't remember at all.

More than our old house, or our Wildflower Ridge place, the beach shack was my dad. I knew if he was haunting any place, it would be there, and for that reason I'd stayed away.

It's funny how one summer can change everything. It must be something about the heat and the smell of chlorine, fresh-cut grass and honeysuckle, asphalt sizzling after late-day thunderstorms, the steam rising while everything drips around it. Something about long, lazy days and whirring air conditioners and bright plastic flip-flops from the drugstore thwacking down the street. Something about fall being so close, another year, another Christmas, another beginning.

Everyone can reach back to one summer and lay a finger to it, finding the exact point when everything changed. That summer was mine.

There is a girl who still writes you; she doesn't know how not to.

It is hard to stop loving the ocean, even after it has left you gasping.

Living in a dream of the future is considered a character flaw. Living in the past, bathed in nostalgia, is also considered a character flaw. Living in the present moment is hailed as spiritually admirable, but truly ignoring the lessons of history or failing to plan for tomorrow are considered character flaws ... I wanted to know how to inhabit time in a way that wasn't a character flaw.

There ought to have been layer cakes, and cookies, and squiggles of boiled sugar candy, Caroline thought as she sat vigil by the bake oven. Swedish crackers, vinegar pie, dried apple pie. The cabin should be heady with brown sugar and clove, and the rich velvety scent of beans and salt pork lazily bubbling in molasses. At the very least, a dried blackberry pie.

There is somehow something extraordinarily alluring about the scent of old paper, and the feel of brittle pages.  It's a gateway opening onto the past; it's a hand stretching out from the long-ago to clasp yours.

Oh, where is it, where did my past go, when I was young, happy and intelligent, when my dreams and thoughts had some grace, and the present and future were lit up with hope? Why is it, that when we've just started to live, we grow dull, gray, uninteresting, lazy, useless, with flattened-out souls?

Technically, it's a family restaurant, but it will only remind you of your family if your mom chain-smoked menthols.

In the United States, there was no simpler, more agreeable time.

That year, a middle-aged acquaintance asked me what my favorite book was and I said On the Road. He smiled, said, That was my favorite book at sixteen. At the time , I thought he was patronizing me, that it was going to be my favorite book forever and ever, amen. But he was right. As an adult, I'm more of a Gatsby girl-more tragic, more sad, just as interested in what America costs as what it has to offer.

The whole reason I wanted to take Owen to Disney World is that I fear that someday he's going to look through his childhood photo album and wonder why all his vacations with his aunt took place at places like the McKinley Memorial and Wounded Knee. And yet here we are. Powell's cemetery was just too close to Cinderella's Castle for me to pass up.

One of the advantages to visiting historic sites as opposed to merely reading about them is the endearing glow of hometown pride.

Never underestimate the corrective lens that is sentimentality.

You can't miss what you don't remember ever having.

Construyo mis recuerdos con el presente. Estoy desechado, abandonado en el presente. En vano trato de alcanzar el pasado; no puedo escaparme.

Some of these days, Oh, you'll miss me honey

I may be old enough for my second childhood, but at least the first is well behind me.

This song came on that sounded unlike anything I had ever heard: an aggressive drum machine pattern, unusual-sounding electronic noises, and of course, on top of it all, that voice. It struck me immediately, so warm and beautiful: The song was "Running Up that Hill (A Deal with God)." It was like a soundtrack to the evening. 

The world needed more fireworks- especially now that there was going to be a shortage of beautiful, useless things.

Few people are capable of concerning themselves with the most recent past. Either the present holds us violently captive, or we lose ourselves in the distant past and strive with might and main to recall and restore what is irrevocably lost.