Quotes About Nostalgia

Your mother goes to the public library, which has been down on its luck for a long time, like most things around here. Last time she brought back a copy of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine that was worn ragged, all held together with tape. She just sank into it, though, she just melted into it.

Remembering my youth makes me aware that I never really had enough of it, it was over before I was done with it.

She thought, if we stay here, soon enough it will be you sitting at the table and me, I don't know, cooking something, and the snow flying, and the old man so glad we're here he'll be off in his study praying about it. And geraniums in the window. Red ones.

Material things are so vulnerable to the humiliations of decay. There are some I dearly wish might be spared.

For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?

Anger and self-righteousness combined with cynicism about the world as he or she sees it are the marks of the ideologue. There is always an element of nostalgia, too, because the ideologue is confident that he or she is moved by a special loyalty to a natural order, or to a good and normative past, which others defy or betray.

Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile? Oh

Forever after, the thought of her would be painful, because it had been pleasant. Strange how that is.

That strong, grassy smell, raw milk in a tin cup.

They left a trail of hopscotch behind them, Mellie always thinking of ways to make it harder. They'd be jumping along in the dust, barefoot, with licorice drops in their mouths, feeling as though they had run off with everything in that town that was worth having.

When I was a child, I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard. I made vocabulary lists.

And she would feel that sharp loneliness she had felt every long evening since she was a child. It was the kind of loneliness that made clocks seem slow and loud and made voices sound like voices across water. Old women she had known, first her grandmother and then her mother, rocked on their porches in the evenings and sang sad songs, and did not wish to be spoken to.

I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect.

I remember once my father and my grandfather were sitting on the porch together, crackling and shelling black walnuts. They loved each other's company, when they weren't at each other's throats, which meant when they were silent, as they were that day.

La infancia no dura para siempre. Algún día lo lamentarás. Pronto serás tan alta como yo.

We had visions in those days, a number of us did. Your young men will have visions and your old men will dream dreams. And now all those young men are old men, if they're alive at all, and their visions are no more than dreams, and the old days are forgotten. We fly forgotten as a dream, as it says in the old hymn, and our dreams are forgotten long before we are.

it's hard to find time to think about Kansas.

I was trying to remember what birds did before there were telephone wires.

If there was one thing she wished she could save from it all, it was the way it felt to walk along beside him.

me! I'll just say—what am I going to say? The house will smell like

And I gave you some of those chocolate cupcakes with the squiggle of white frosting across the top. I buy those for your mother because she loved them and won't buy them for herself.

Ah, we love where we are born, we Sicilians, but Sicily does not love us.

I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls in the Calle Ocharan, in Miraflores.

Y sigo pensando que, a pesar de haber vivido ya tantos veranos, aquél fue el más fabuloso de todos.