Quotes About Nostalgia

She found herself staring at a tintype, a late-nineteenth-century photograph.

Ah, yes, beautiful English bones.

The woman was forty-one years old, yet she looked both ancient and young—a stooped and pale child, untouched by adult worry or passion. Deirdre, did you ever have a lover? Did you ever dance in that parlor?

I have no one here, and then who comes but one who left such a stamp on my girlish heart that the details are as deep as the finest coin.

It was as though on the smell of the rain came her perfume still, and in the empty theater I could hear the throb of her beating heart.

I knew that things human would lose all love of this place, as they had lost their love of so many ruins in the country round.

Geliebten Lakaien are once again here with us. Lisa, Heddy, Henrietta, Peter, and Jean Pierre

Do you know how it wounds me to leave behind the one city in the world with which I'm truly in love?

Why did we wander for so many years together, drifting like elegant phantoms in our lace and velvet cerements into the garish electric lights and electronic noise of the modern age?

You are like an adult who, looking back on his childhood, realizes that he never appreciated it. You cannot, as a man, go back to the nursery and play with your toys, asking for the love and care

Give me the boy I was, give me the finest green satin and ruff upon ruff of fancy lace, give me stockings and braided boots, and let my hair be clean and shining.

He was a boy dying here whom few would remember except for me.

All the old poetry makes sense when you look at one whom you have loved.

winter days, but distantly. Like very old ghosts.

Sometimes—not very often, in any life—there come days so perfect and seamless and golden that you remember them always. Almost everyone has them, though some, I think, have more than others. It just isn't given to everyone to simply love a day for its own sake. But they are the very coin of memory, and you can pull them out over and over again and fondle them, and spend them, and they are never depleted.

For one thing, she was quite astonishingly beautiful. Not at all in the common style, she was possessed of a thick mane of impossibly flame-colored hair, a tall, lush body of dangerous voluptuousness, and the warm, honey-colored eyes of a complete innocent. That red hair called to him, a siren lure, but he assumed it was only nostalgia and misplaced sentiment. Not that he'd ever been known to possess those two qualities.

Smells could bring a person back clearer than pictures even could.

Sometimes he fantasised that at the end of his life, he would be shown a home movie of all the roads he had not taken, and where they would have led.

I liked to dwell on these shortcomings now. It wasn't only that I was wondering why they had ever annoyed me. I was hoping they would annoy me still, so that I could stop missing her.

Two losses, in fact. Two very dear children: Emily and Nicholas. It was true that these days there happened to be two very dear grown-ups who were also named Emily and Nicholas, but they weren't the same people. It was just as if those children had died. He'd been in mourning ever since.

The thing about old girlfriends, Micah reflected, is that each one subtracts something from

Music is so different now, she had said to [him] once. It used to be 'Love Me Forever' and now it's 'Help Me Make It Through the Night.' Aw, Ma, he had said, don't you get it? In the old days they just hid it better. It was always 'Help Me Make It Through the Night.

I am the bicycle you lost in the park the summer you turned twelve… You didn't think I was so great anymore… You started finding fault with all I said...

Like most youngest children, he had trouble remembering his own past. The older ones did it so well for him, why should he bother? They had built him a second-hand memory that included the years before he existed, even. He had a distinct memory of Melissa's running away from home with a peanut sandwich and a pomegranate, two years before he was born; but he himself, with his locust on a leash, had vanished.