Quotes About Nostalgia

David Manning White] maintains that critics romanticize the past in order to castigate the present.

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.

It's the simple things we miss, she thought.

She had never been a gloomy person. There had been some good times aboard Ringmaster, but little out-and-out fun.

People seldom realize just how gigantic the old steam locomotives were until they stand next to one, and

I think that all human systems require continuous renewal. They rigidify. They get stiff in the joints. They forget what they cared about. The forces against it are nostalgia and the enormous appeal of having things the way they have always been, appeals to a supposedly happy past. But we've got to move on.

Let's say I hope that I appeal to the more carefree times in a person's life rather than to his reasoning adulthood. I'd just like to be an image that reminds someone of joy rather than of the problems of the world.

Think back, pilgrim… Remember?

would paint, to him in all the glowing colours of youthful memory, the marriage pomp she remembered viewing in her infancy;

That is the very best time of life, he thought again: when you are very young, when living is a simple, perfect succession of golden days.

When he was much older, he was to look back upon his last two undergraduate years as if they were an unreal time that belonged to someone else, a time that passed, not in the regular flow to which he was used, but in fits and starts. One moment was juxtaposed against another, yet isolated from it, and he had the feeling that he was removed from time, watching as it passed before him like a great unevenly turned diorama.

he thought of the years before, the distant years with his parents on the farm, and of the deadness from which he had been miraculously revived.

could think of his daughter only as a very small girl who had once sat beside him in a distant room and looked at him with solemn delight, as a lovely child who long ago had died.

Perhaps we are wiser when we are young, though the philosopher would dispute with me. But I swear to you, we were friends from that moment onward; and that moment of foolish laughter was a bond stronger than anything that came between us later —victories or defeats, loyalties or betrayals, griefs or joys. But the days of youth go, and part of us goes with them, not to return.

But there was a time when we were young - Marcus Agrippa was young too, - there was a time when we were friends, and knew that we would be friends for as long as we lived. Agrippa; Maecenas; myself; Salvidienus Rufus. Salvidienus is dead too, but he died long ago. Perhaps we all died then, when we were young.

Even now, after all these years, I can taste the bitter sweetness of that body, and feel beneath me the firm warmth. It is odd that I can do so, for I know that the flesh of Julius Antonius now is smoke, and is dispersed into the air. That body is no more, and my body remains upon this earth. It is odd to know that. No other man has touched me since that afternoon. No man shall touch me for as long as I shall live.

I like to spend time in the past, with the things that have been important to me.

As Proust put it, the only paradises are those we have lost.

I shall miss you,' said Perley. 'Of course I shall miss you, Maverick. So should I miss the piano, if it were taken out of the parlor.

Sweetest the strain when in the song The singer has been lost.

Past and future to him were the realities; the present dull, meaningless, only significant if, as now, going back along the sands, he could say to himself: 'Later on, I shall remember.

Do you recall a shepherd's crook, Laurence? And Gladstone-bag? We may be Liberals, but I didn't know we had a Gladstone-bag.

When I got to the library I came to a standstill, - ah, the dear room, what happy times I have spent in it rummaging amongst the books, making plans for my garden, building castles in the air, writing, dreaming, doing nothing.

You know how sometimes when you come home and you haven't seen a place for so long that it seems unbelievably beautiful, and you want to cry because you love it so much you think it's going to break your heart? I felt like that, too. I am HOME.