Quotes About Nostalgia

just where they had left it at Christmas. They collected

She felt she was a bottomless pit of memories, and she was only fifteen. What on earth must it be like when you reached the Duchy's age? You'd hardly be able to think at all for them; it would be like having so much furniture in a room that there was nowhere left to move.

La notte era il momento peggiore. Si coricava, tentava di leggere un po', poi si rendeva conto che nulla di quanto leggeva le restava in testa; allora prendeva un sonnifero, spegneva la luce, cercava di riprodurre nella mente una musica che le piaceva, che la rassicurava. Ma la musica veniva subito spazzata via da una ridda feroce di ricordi e sensazioni, momenti passati con lui che si congelavano in scene salienti, come un fermo immagine di un film.

I heard a wisp of regret in Dad's voice and pictured him angled against the stove in the

I ran my finger over the text, then held the book up to my face, closed my eyes, and inhaled the sweet-sour scent of old paper and binding glue. Did everyone who loved books do this when they encountered a new one?

I'll probably never again feel as intensely about books, read as desperately, and fall as deeply in love with stories and characters as I did that summer. Now when I read, I'm continuously trying to bring back that same immersion, fall in love again, and I judge every book against that impossible ideal. The books I love now aren't necessarily those that are written best, they're those books, like The Thorn Birds and Clan Of The Cave Bear, that bring me closest to that magic.

It's funny; in this era of e-mail and voice mail and all those things that even I did not grow up with, a plain old paper letter takes on amazing intimacy.

And how could anyone consent to give up the smell of open books, old or new?

There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.

Too many memories, each one sharper and more painful than the last.

Many of the names on the gravestones are also the names of town roads, which reminded me of my long-ago childhood, when these roads were essentially long unpaved driveways named for the people whose farms were at the ends of them.

Maybe better that way, to not know our parents, to love them as we move away from them--they're on the shore and we're on a ship, moving away; later we will switch places as they sail away from us, and we say to them, a little longer.

This was her flaw as a parent, she thought later: she had never truly gotten rid of a single maternal worry. They were all in the closet, with the minuscule footed pajamas and hand-knit baby hats, and every day Laura took them out, unfolded them, tried to put them to use.

She'd let her eyes water so the view was blurry, which gave certain qualities of the world neglected by clear eyesight the chance to come forth, such as the shocking beauty of color, and she remembered this with compassion for that silly young self, which had deserved to have her hand held.

It is one kind of trouble to kiss your fiancé good-bye in the morning and immediately turn your thoughts to another man. But it's another kind altogether if the other man has been dead for nine decades, or is of the genus Sciurus.

amanda lifted a large handful of pictures out of the box and dropped them into her lap, flicking through them as they fall. they told a thousand stories, didn't they? the pictures of your life. but they left a lot out, too.

I didn't want it to be one good memory that led to a lot of bad ones. I wanted it to stay what it was, one amazing moment, something that was strong and sweet enough to stand on its own. Something I could remember without any pain. - Kate

She became a story, one I have mostly forgotten. One I can't end because she died a long time ago.

In all the photos I see the boy I once knew and the man he became, a flawed but decent man whom I grew to care about in a more complicated way than I had ever cared about the boy.

The year that followed - was it the happiest year of his own life? He often thought so, even knowing that such a thing was foolish to claim about any year of one's life: but in his memory, that particular year held the sweetness of a time that contained no thoughts of a beginning and no thoughts of an end..

No. I had enough of babies growing up." "Never mind. Kids are just a needle in your heart.

This had often broken my heart, to realize that you never know the last time you pick up a child. Maybe you say "Oh, honey, you're getting too big to be picked up" or something like that. But then you never pick them up again.

I feel almost, then, that I can hear within me the sound of my own heart breaking, the way you could hear outside in the open air-when the conditions were exactly right-the corn growing in the fields of my youth...You cannot hear my heart breaking, and I know that part is true, but to me, they are inseparable, the sound of growing corn and the sound of my heart breaking.

They say that's what happens as you get older. You think about the things of your youth.