Quotes About Nostalgia

and nostalgia swept through Jimmy like a sudden hunger.

While in a vintage restaurant...the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.

Amazing how quickly the past becomes idyllic.

I have them, these attacks of the past, like faintness, a wave sweeping over my head.

with shrunken fingers we ate our oranges and bread, shivering in the parked car; though we know we had never been there before, we knew we had been there before.

I look up at the ceiling, tracing the foliage of the wreath. Today it makes me think of a hat, the large-brimmed hats women used to wear at some period during the old days: hats like enormous halos, festooned with fruit and flowers, and the feathers of exotic birds; hats like an idea of paradise, floating just above the head, a thought solidified.

You'll be here but not here, a muscle memory, like hanging a hat on a hook that's not there any longer.

A Tennyson garden, heavy with scent, languid; the return of the word swoon.

You'll have to forgive me. I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it. Like a White Russian drinking tea in Paris, marooned in the twentieth century, I wander back, try to regain those distant pathways; I become too maudlin, lose myself. Weep. Weeping is what it is, not crying. I sit in this chair and ooze like a sponge.

The stains on the mattress. Like dried flower petals. Not recent. Old love; there's no other kind of love in this room now.

Already my childhood seemed far away—a remote age, faded and bittersweet, like dried flowers. Did I regret its loss, did I want it back? I didn't think so.

How I would like to have them back, those pointless afternoons - the boredom, the aimlessness, the unformed possibilities.

There I am, in the Grade Six class picture, smiling broadly. Happy as a clam , is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hardshelled, firmly closed.

How strange to remember typewriters, with their jammed keys and snarled ribbons and the smudgy carbon paper for copies.

I don't give a glance to what's still on the walls, I hate those neo-expressionist dirty greens and putrid oranges, post this, post that. Everything is post these days, as if we're all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.

That was all quite long ago. I see it in retrospect, indulgently, from the point I've reached now. But how else could I see it. We can't really travel to the past, no matter how we try. if we do, it's as tourists.

she doesn't want to begin, she wants to continue. No: she wants to go back.

Young love, thinks Felix wistfully. So good for the complexion.

Like a White Russian drinking tea in Paris, marooned in the twentieth century, I wander back, try to regain hose distant pathways; I become too maudlin, lose myself. Weep...I sit in the chair and ooze like a sponge.

The past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you can see it as décor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.

I'd wanted to leave home, but have it stay in place, waiting for me, unchanged, so I could step back into it at will.

How young they are, how frisky! I thought. How touchingly innocent! Was I ever like that? I could not remember.

He had been with me, but he wasn't with me now, we had been walking along a street like this one and then the future swept over us and we were separated. He was in the distance now, across the ocean, on a beach, the wind ruffling his hair, I could hardly see his features. He was moving at an ever-increasing speed away from me, into the land of the dead, the dead past, irretrievable.

I would pore for hours over the stalls of worn necklaces, sets of gilt spoons, sugar tongs in the shape of hen's feet or midget hands, clocks that didn't work, flowered china, spotty mirrors and ponderous furniture, the flotsam left by those receding centuries in which, more and more, I was living.