Quotes About Nostalgia

The author says one character's definition of a classic is any book he'd heard of before he was thirty.

Gosh all fishhooks! Ted wailed to Eunice, as they wolfed hot chocolate, lumps of nougat, and an assortment of glace nuts, in the mosaic splendor of the Royal Drug Store, it gets me why Dad doesn't just pass out from being so poky.

Not one of them had found life quite the amusing and triumphant adventure he had expected; and they came back wistfully, longing to recapture their credulous golden days. They believed (for a week) that their classmates were peculiarly set apart from the crooked and exasperating race of men as a whole.

the youngsters in canoes were now singing My Old Kentucky Home. Zenith was still in the halcyon William Dean Howells days; not yet had it become the duty of young people to be hard and brisk, and knowing about radios, jazz, and gin.

Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old loves are the worst.

Look back, and smile on perils past.

But... we'll always have Paris. I pause, thinking this through. At least, you'll have it. And you can tell me about it.

Above all, staring at my old bedroom ceiling, I feel safe. Cocooned from the world; wrapped up in cotton wool. No one can get me here. No one even knows I'm here. I won't get any nasty letters and I won't get any nasty phone calls and I won't get any nasty visitors. It's like a sanctuary. I feel as if I'm fifteen again, with nothing to worry about but my Homework. (And I haven't even got any of that.)

You can't hold on to things just because of the memories. Otherwise, no one would ever move house. Or country. Or chuck a crap boyfriend. Every crap boyfriend has at least one good memory attached to him. But you have to let them go. Otherwise, you're all, 'Oh, but there was that lovely time we walked in the autumn leaves.

We'll always have jazz

I can't believe how much damage has been done, just from teenage loves meeting again. People should never come into contact with their first loves, I decide. There should be some official form of quarantine. The rule should be: you break up with your teenage lover and that's it. One of you has to emigrate.

It'll be George Michael all over again, Dad mutters darkly to Mum, and I give a sharp intake of breath. That is AGAINST our family code. No one was supposed to mention George Michael ever again. We even turn off Carless Whisper whenever it comes on.

Shopping has really changed for me over the years. Or maybe I've changed. The days when I was a single girl, living in Fulham with Suze and going round the shops every day, seem ages ago now. Yes, I used to spend too much. I'll freely admit it. I've made mistakes. Like Frank Sinatra, I did it my way. (Except "my way" involved stuffing Visa bills under the bed, which I bet Frank never did.)

Honeysuckle and jasmine!" I exclaim in sudden recognition. I have the Jo Malone bath oil at home.

It hasn't snowed like this for years. Real, proper snow. Dickensian snow

Funny how memories come back - sometimes in dribs and drabs, sometimes in enormous sweeps.

He pauses to stretch out his fingers and I'm suddenly transfixed by his hands. Hands which used to roam over me, caress me, make love to me. I know how much emotional intelligence is in those hands. I know how he balances thoughtful, cerebral caution with audacious risk-taking, all without a flicker.

I still remember Mum. Kind of. I have dim splashes of memory like an unfinished watercolor.

At this point, I felt a sudden pang. A yearning to climb up into the tree house again. To lie down on the smooth wooden boards, gaze up at the sky through the open windows and just... remember. But I chose to ignore it. If you listened to every pang, you wouldn't get anywhere in life.

We long to have again the vanished past, in spite of all its pain.

When the Greek mercenaries of Xenophon's Anabasis, after months of marching and fighting in the mountains of Turkey, finally reached the Black Sea, one of them said, thankfully, "Now I can go home like Odysseus, flat on my back.

When the child must be weaned, the mother too is not without sorrow at the thought that she and the child are separated more and more, that the child which first lay under her heart and later reposed upon her breast will be so near to her no more.

Suddenly, it's all too much. Bryn and the bump watch. Vanessa with my high school yearbook. The idea that nothing's sacred. Everything's fodder. That my life belongs to anyone but me.

Young people don't have a fantasy life anymore, not the way we did. All they've got is Kojak and Dirty Harry. There's all these kids running around wanting to be killer cops.