Quotes About Nostalgia

An odd thing souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now.

I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except

you can't change the past, Aunt Lou used to say. Oh, but I wanted to; that was the one thing I really wanted to do

You want to go back to where the sky was inside us

An odd thing, souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now. You don't really believe you're there, and so you nick the proof, or something you mistake for it.

But sometimes I see instead the young girl's face I once spent so much time rearranging and deploring, drowned and floating just beneath my present face

most people prefer a past is which nothing smells.

A movie about the past is not the same as the past.

The poems that used to entrance me in the days of Miss Violence now struck me as overdone and sickly. Alas, burthen, thine, cometh, aweary —the archaic language of unrequited love. I was irritated with such words, which rendered the unhappy lovers—I could now see—faintly ridiculous, like poor moping Miss Violence herself. Soft-edged, blurry, soggy, like a bun fallen into the water. Nothing you'd want to touch

What was the rationale for all this pillaging? Souvenirs. These people needed something to remember themselves by. An odd thing, souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now. You don't really believe you're there, and so you nick the proof, or something you mistake for it.

It's an old word, fading now. Dearly did I wish. Dearly did I long for. I loved him dearly.

The collective memory is notoriously faulty, and much of the past sinks into the ocean of time to be drowned forever; but once in a while the waters part, allowing us to glimpse a flash of hidden treasure, if only for a moment.

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.

All that time, blowing away in the summer breeze. It was daisies for love though, and we did that too

The past is so much safer, because whatever's in it has already happened. It can't be changed; so, in a way, there's nothing to dread.

History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.

Charis tried not to mind, since nothing that was or had been would perish, and the farm was still inside her, it was still hers because places belonged to the people who loved them.

I remember Queen Victoria's advice to her daughter. Close your eyes and think of England.

I've forgotten about these things all winter, but here they are again, and when I see them I remember them, I know them, I greet them as if they are home.

My own hair reposes in a cardboard box in a steamer trunk in my mother's cellar, where I picture it becoming duller and more brittle with each passing year, and possibly moth-eaten; by now it will look like the faced wreaths of hair in Victorian funeral jewelry. Or it may have developed a dry mildew; inside its tissue-paper wrappings it glows faintly, in the darkness of the trunk.

I try to remember if the past was exactly like this. I'm not sure, now. I know it contained these things, but somehow the mix is different. A movie about the past is not the same as the past.

I watched your snapshot fade for twenty years.

there goes this day, down to where all the other days have gone, each one carrying something away with it.

She was something of his own that he had lost.