Quotes About Nostalgia

But no one ever leaves the town where they grew up, not really, even if they go.

and when nanas die they leave grandchildren and perhaps a trace memory of being coddled, kissed, attended to, and loved, of being chased across the lawn or rocked in the middle of the night or taken seriously. In Nanaville there is always in the back of my mind the understanding that I am building a memory out of spare parts and that, someday, that memory will be all that's left of me.

She is a prisoner in the amber of her own past.

I want to be able to remember it all, not just the books but the newsrooms and the playgroups and the bad jokes and the holiday traditions. In my mind I can walk through the house where I grew up even though I have not been inside it for decades . . . I want to be able to walk through the house of my own life until my life is done. I want to hold on to who and what I have been even as both become somehow inevitably less.

A fix-it man, they used to call it, when things still got fixed instead of just junked. If

I looked around and it was like I was seeing everything frozen into a still photograph, like I was seeing my whole life but in one of those shots you look and later think, Yeah, that's what it was like, once upon a time. Once upon a time ago.

He'd had a dog once, in that way he'd had everything in his childhood, ordinary but a lot less lasting.

She knew any reasonable person would say she should downsize, downgrade, sell her apartment, but that was if you thought of an apartment as real estate instead of a home. She didn't want to sell her home. She thought of it as the last link to the self she had once been.

knew, that for a birthday or a holiday or simply a dinner party offering, they could bring her a snow globe. Except that Dorothea was no longer charmed by snow

One of his favorite words now is "Pop." There's no question that it feels good in his mouth, but it's not just that. In the way these things usually go in the house of family, Nana is wallpaper and Pop is a chandelier. "Pop! Pop!" he shouts now, searching for his grandfather.

Very soon the train came puffing up into the station; then two or three minutes, and the doors were slammed to, the guard whistled, and the train glided away, leaving behind it only clouds of white smoke and some very heavy hearts.

but not finding it equally suitable to my taste, I presently fell back, and began to botanise and entomologise along the green banks and budding hedges, till the company was considerably in advance of me, and I could hear the sweet song of the happy lark; then my spirit of misanthropy began to melt away beneath the soft, pure air and genial sunshine; but sad thoughts of early childhood, and yearnings for departed joys, or for a brighter future lot, arose instead.

And, in fact, this is the tale that I would love to write: history is such a romantic place, with its jarveys and urchins and side-buttoned boots. If it would just stay still, I think, and settle down. If it would just stop sliding around in my head.

The shells] do not have the meaning they once did, but, as Swann said in Remembrance of Things Past, even when one is no longer attached to things, it's still something to have been attached to them. (22)

Going through a dead parent's memorabilia is a hazardous undertaking; there is a fine line between pleasure and pain.

One night when I was pregnant with Henry, I lay in bed thinking for some reason, about Treasure Island. I realized that from the entire book there was only one sentence I remembered verbatim, something that Ben Gunn, who has been marooned for three years, says to Jim Hawkins: Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese -- toasted mostly. I repeated the last two words over and over again, like a mantra. Toasted, mostly. Toasted mostly.

Reading a favorite book to your child is one of the most pleasurable forms of rereading, provided the child's enthusiasm is equal to yours and thus gratifyingly validates your literary taste, your parental competence, and your own former self.

Looking back, I realize that this period of my life has irrevocably come to a close; my happy-go-lucky, carefree schooldays are gone forever. I don't even miss them. I've outgrown them. I can no longer just kid around, since my serious side is always there.

Deep down I know I could never be that innocent again, however much I'd like to be.

Things were different when I was growing up.

It still makes me happy to think back to those words and that look

Îmi dau seama c? o etap? din ea s-a încheiat definitiv: perioada f?r? griji È™i necazuri a anilor de È™coal? nu se mai întoarce niciodat?. Nici m?car n-o regret, am dep??it stadiul ?sta, nu pot s? fac doar tâmpenii, o p?rticic? din mine îÈ™i p?streaz? mereu gravitatea.

Ode to My Fountain Pen In Memoriam My

Later on, when you are older, you won't enjoy anything., then you'll say: 'I read that in books twenty years ago.