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Quotes About Nostalgia

Together we all looked like we had been plucked from the distant decade of 1980–89 and deposited into this dull, awkward future, a bunch of poorly dressed sinners throwing ourselves at the mercy of Christ, who was always sharp-looking and trim, graceful in pain, kindly in Heaven. I
~ Gary Shteyngart
In the glittering light I got drunk and reeled through the rooms, And cried, "Cartagena! swamp of unholy loves!" And wept for the Indian whores who were younger than me, and I was eighteen, And splashed after the crew down the streets wearing sandals bought at a stall And got back to the ship, dawn came, we were far out at sea.
~ Gary Snyder
Therefore, the places in which we have experienced day dreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as day-dreams these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all the time.
~ Gaston Bachelard
Therefore, the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as day-dreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.
~ Gaston Bachelard
So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.
~ Gaston Bachelard
It may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual.
~ Gene Wolfe
I was trapped in admiration for what I had once admired, as a fly in amber remains the captive of some long-vanished pine.
~ Gene Wolfe
Before I had so much as opened any of the other volumes, I felt that pressure of time that is perhaps the surest indication we have left childhood behind.
~ Gene Wolfe
A young man seeks a woman and finds her and is great and dies to the world. Afterward he is never as great again, but the woman is a comfort to him, reminding him of the time that was, and he is a little again with her what once he was wholly.
~ Gene Wolfe
From the top of the ramp he looked back and saw them go, their glasses crashing to the flagstoned paths and brick paved patios, their cigarettes dropping like poisoned fireflies. "I loved you," the girl said. "Or at least I liked you. You'll be gone in a moment and I can't even ask you to kiss me, because I'm going to be sick." "We're still here," John Edward told her, "both of us." And she was gone.
~ Gene Wolfe
You're old when your dreams become regrets
~ Gene Wolfe
The plain shiprock walls, and the painted statue of Lord Pas (from which the paint was peeling) will remain with me until the day I die, always somewhat colored by the wonder I felt as a small boy at seeing a black cock struggling in the old man's hands after he had cut its throat, its wings beating frantically, beating as if they might live after all, live somehow somewhere, if only they could spray the whole place with blood before they
~ Gene Wolfe
The heart remembers even when no trace of face or voice remains.
~ Gene Wolfe
This unfocused terror, this faceless menace of the night, was the earliest of all my childhood fears; and as such, now that childhood was behind me, it had the homey quality of all childhood things when we are fully grown.
~ Gene Wolfe
I'm in the back of a limousine with Charlie Chaplin and it's 1928. Charlie is beautiful; his body language seems to skip, and reel and rhyme, heartbreaking and witty at the same time. It seems to promise a better world.
~ Geoff Ryman
Designer of information superhighways need to take the occasional stroll down memory lane.
~ Geoffrey Bowker
The older you get, the better you realize you were.
~ George Carlin
I was a hip kid. When I saw Bambi it was the midnight show.
~ George Carlin
America has no now. We're reluctant to acknowledge the present. It's too embarrassing. Instead, we reach into the past. Our culture is composed of sequels, reruns, remakes, revivals, reissues, re-releases, recreations, reenactments, adaptations, anniversaries, memorabilia, oldies radio, and nostalgia record collections. World War II has been refought so many times, the Germans and Japanese are now drawing residuals.
~ George Carlin
Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.
~ George Eliot
They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.
~ George Eliot
She had forgotten his faults as we forget the sorrows of our departed childhood.
~ George Eliot
And there is no better reason for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early memory, that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely through my present sensibilities to form and colour, but the long companion of my existence that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid.
~ George Eliot
So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's bosom or rode on our father's back in childhood. Doubtless that joy is wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot, but it is gone for ever from our imagination, and we can only BELIEVE in the joy of childhood.
~ George Eliot