Quotes About Nostalgia

What are you looking for back there?" said Mama. "Yesterday's snow?

But she was looking into the past, trying to understand when it was that all the laughter died.

En cuanto a las necesidades religiosas, considero irrefutable su derivación del desamparo infantil y de la nostalgia por el padre

It would undo me, I think, to glimpse some familiar piece of clothing, or a certain book or photograph, or to catch a hint of your smell. And I don't want to be undone like that, oh my God, not with your widow standing by.

When did she plant the roses. In full magnificent bloom now, the red and the white. A fragrance to make you go, Aaah. I think how much they must have pleased her, year after year, and made her proud. And it's not the thought that she must miss them, but that she's no longer capable of missing them, that makes me sad.

And it's not the thought that she must miss them, but that she's no longer capable of missing them, that makes me sad. What we miss—what we lose and what we mourn—isn't it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are. To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.

talk about the times I see you. Each time my heart turns over. But why should it be that almost always the person I mistake for you is someone who looks like you not at the age when you died but at some other stage of your life.

She felt as if she had spent her childhood here, running, lying back, pulling out the stamens of honeysuckle to drink their juice.

Clay wished that he could piece the story of his mother together in the same way. He might find scraps of her life, stitch them together, and have a whole that he could pull up to his neck and feel warm beneath.

Don't you have some songs, boyo?" she asked, after one of her songs. I didn't know any of them all the way through, but I sang the verses and choruses of all the songs we used to sing back on the Preserve: "Angel from Montgomery," "No Hard Feelings," "You Got Gold," "The Story.

If there had been mile markers on the side of the road, they would have clicked off the years instead of the miles: 1994...1982...1974.

We note our place with bookmarkers That measure what we've lost.

Is nostalgia stopping our culture's ability to surge forward, or are we nostalgic precisely because our culture has stopped moving forward and so we inevitably look back to more momentous and dynamic times?

Retro's stomping ground isn't the auction house or antique dealer but the flea market, charity shop, jumble sale and junk shop.

It is dreadful to think that behind me my own past is no longer anything but shifting darkness.

Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies.

It must feel wonderfully strange when, like Manette, one stands there, the only witness to a vanished world.

She asked us to raise the curtain that was covering the window and she looked at the golden leaves of the trees. 'How lovely. I shouldn't see that from my flat!' She smiled. And both of us, my sister and I, had the same thought: it was that same smile that had dazzled us when we were little children, the radiant smile of a young woman. Where had it been between then and now?

I had had a general sort of idea that the life I had behind me was a landscape in which I could wander as I pleased, gradually exploring its winding and its hidden valleys. No. I could repeat names and dates, just as a schoolboy can bring out a carefully learned lesson on a subject he knows nothing about. And at long intervals there arose worn, faded images, as abstract as those in my old French history: they stood out arbitrarily, against a white background.

When I was grown up I wanted to crunch flowering almond trees, and take bites out of the the rainbow nougats of the sunset. Against the night sky of New York, the neon signs appeared to me like giant sweatmeats

And there was one dream common to most young aristocrats of the time. Scions of a declining class which had once possessed concrete power, but which no longer retained any real hold on the world, they tried to revive symbolically, in the privacy of the bed chamber, the status for which they were nostalgic: that of the lone and sovereign feudal despot.

I realized that I had come here in the hope of once more finding that man so hopelessly in love: I had not seen him for years and years, although this memory lies like a transparency over all the visions I have of him. That evening, for the very reason that the surroundings were the same, the old image, coming into contact with a flesh and blood man smoking a cigarette, fell to dust and ashes, I had a shattering revelation: time goes by. I began to weep.

I also like to think that after the slight shock of separation you will not feel any sorrow … and that if you should sometimes happen to think of me you will do so as one thinks of a book one read in childhood. I do not want ever to occupy a different place from that in the hearts of those I love, because then I can be sure of never causing them any unhappiness.

Piety in regard to the dead: to do everything for what does not exist.