Quotes About Nostalgia

I am most at home in small places—Shamli and Saharanpur; Darjeeling and Dehra; Karnal and Kasauli; Meerut and Mussoorie….These are the places I know best, and where I have found my friends and heroes, and my stories.

But only yesterdays are truly splendid … And there are other singers, sweeter than I, to sing of tomorrow. I can only write of today, of Pipalnagar, where I have lived and loved.

Some memories are best left untouched.

And the last puff of the day-wind brought from the unseen villages the scent of damp wood-smoke, hot cakes, dripping undergrowth, and rotting pine-cones. That is the true smell of the Himalayas, and if once it creeps into the blood of a man, that man will at the last, forgetting all else, return to the hills to die. —Rudyard Kipling

That first day at school, maybe an agonising parting from your parents. The face of a loved one lost. A pullover knitted by your granny. A favourite toy. A doll, perhaps. A book of rhymes, tattered and torn. Someone who gave you a flower, a kiss on the forehead. To the end of your days you will carry that kiss with you. And may it protect you from all harm.

Winding its way towards the plains. And the land stretched out before me, and the years fell away, And I was a boy again, And the friends of my youth were there beside me, And nothing had changed. 'Remember the Old Road

they will take you back to a time when life was not so full of care and there was time to stand and stare. But not for too long, or the train would leave without you!

there's no harm in indulging in a little nostalgia. What is nostalgia, after all, but an attempt to preserve that which was good in the past?

Ah, those picnics! They seem to be a thing of the past, now that you can drive almost anywhere and find a line of dhabas awaiting you. Few people today bother to prepare those delicate sandwiches or delicious parathas when packets of potato chips and other fast foods are to be found at every bend of the road.

Grandfather was about sixty, a lean active man who still rode his bicycle at great speed.

We must move on, of course. There's no point in hankering after distant pleasures and lost picture palaces. But there's no harm in indulging in a little nostalgia. What is nostalgia, after all, but an attempt to preserve that which was good in the past? And

Those were the days of simple living. You don't see two-rupee notes any more. You don't see walking sticks either. Hardly anyone walks.

We said goodbye. 'Remember this day, Ruskin,' said my father. He patted me gently on the head and walked away. I never saw him again. Three months later I heard that he had passed away in the military hospital in Calcutta. I dream of him sometimes, and in my dream he is always the same, caring for me and leading me by the hand along old familiar roads.

I bought the records. Can't play them now. No wind-up gramophone! But I am a sentimental fellow and I keep them among my souvenirs as a reminder of the days when I walked home alone across the silent, moonlit parade ground, after the evening show was over.

The past is always with us, for it feeds the present.

How evanescent those loves and friendships seem at this distance in time…We move on, make new attachments. We grow old. But sometimes, we hanker for old friendships, the old loves. Sometimes I wish I was young again. Or that I could travel back in time and pick up the threads. Absent so long, I may have stopped loving you, friends; but I will never stop loving the Day I loved you.

Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were.

What became of the friends I hadWith whom I was always so closeAnd loved so dearly?

It's the land of my ancestors. I need to set my feet on that soil and see how I feel. I have missed my mother's warm tortillas and many more things than I can name.

It had been an occasion for reminiscing, but there are limits. And so my childhood falls into a black hole.

Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren't tears. She wasn't crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.

I was given some bits of rock sugar and a few flower petals which I did not of course like to throw away so that I was still clutching them on the bus back to Satipur. When I thought Inder Lal was not looking, I respectfully tipped them out the side of the bus, but they have left the palm of my hand sticky and with a lingering smell of sweetness and decay that is still there as I write.

That's what I like so much about libraries, they smell the way we would like to imagine the past.

They spoke from a distant past when everyone read books and most people had hobbies, made things, played cards and chess, dressed up and played charades, sewed and painted and wrote letters and sent postcards.