Quotes About Nostalgia

Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin. It is largely because of the books, films and reminiscences that have come between that the war of 1914-18 is now supposed to have had some tremendous, epic quality that the present one lacks.

What mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist. To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.

What's the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They don't exist. Comping up for air! But there isn't any air. The dustbin that we're in reaches up to the stratosphere.

Don't think that I did nothing else. It's only that when you look back over a long period of time, certain things seem to swell up till they overshadow everything else.

it was a stirring tune, something between 'Clementine' and 'La Cucuracha'.

Is it gone for ever? I'm not certain. But I tell you it was a good world to live in. I belong to it. So do you.

I am sentimental about my childhood—not my own particular childhood, but the civilization which I grew up in and which is now, I suppose, just about at its last kick.

One thing, I thought as I drove down the hill, I'm finished with this notion of getting back into the past. What's the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They don't exist. Coming up for air! But there isn't any air. The dustbin that we're in reaches up to the stratosphere.

Pourquoi avait-il du mal à supporter la vie actuelle, si ce n'est qu'il y avait une sorte de souvenir ancestral d'une époque où tout était différent ?

He had dragged out from the corners of his memory some more fragments of forgotten rhymes.

WHAT WAS MORE, I ACTUALLY HAD A FEELING THAT THEY WERE AFTER ME ALREADY. THE WHOLE LOT OF THEM! ALL THE PEOPLE WHO COULDN'T UNDERSTAND WHY A MIDDLE-AGED MAN WITH FALSE TEETH SHOULD SNEAK AWAY FOR A QUIET WEEK IN THE PLACE WHERE HE SPENT HIS BOYHOOD. AND ALL THE MEAN-MINDED BASTARDS WHO COULD UNDERSTAND ONLY TOO WELL, AND WHO'D RAISE HEAVEN AND EARTH TO PREVENT IT. THEY WERE ALL ON MY TRACK.

I loved [fairy stories] so, and my mother weighed down by grief had given up telling me them. At Nohant I found Mmes. d'Ardony's and Perrault's tales in old editions which became my chief joy for five or six years ... I've never read them since, but I could tell each tale straight through, and I don't think anything in all one's intellecutal life can be compared to these delights of imagination.

Le mal du pays fait cet effet-là à tout le monde : il transforme les objets de nos souvenirs en idéalités poétiques, dont les qualités grandissent à nos yeux, tandis que les défauts s'adoucissent toujours avec le temps et l'absence, et vont jusqu'à s'effacer dans notre imagination.

Of suddenly remembering what was lost.

What a beautiful country this must have been once, when you could hop in a coupe and buy a bag of burgers and drive, drive, drive, stopping to swim in a river or sleep in a grove of trees without worrying about intaking mutagens or having the militia arrest you and send you to the Everglades for eternity.

Oh it was nice, he said sadly. So nice there. But we can't go back. To how we were. All we can do is what we should.

Those were comfortable, carefree years. The word I'd use now is idyllic. On Friday nights, we cheered on the Bulldogs of Midland High. On Sunday mornings, we went to church. Nobody locked their doors. Years later, when I would speak about the American Dream, it was Midland I had in mind.

Je me souviens de Dop Dop Dop, adoptez le shampooing Dop. (Je me souviens, 1978)

Or from even further back, from as far back as she could remember, there rose the fascination she had felt as a little girl every time she saw her grandfather shaving: he would sit down, usually around seven in the morning, after a frugal breakfast, and with a serious air make up his lather with a very soft brush in a bowl of very hot water, a lather so thick and white and firm that even after more than seventy-five years it still made her mouth water.

The widower reviewed his past in a sunless light which was intensified by the greyness of the November twilight, whilst the bells subtly impregnated the surrounding atmosphere with the melody of sounds that faded like the ashes of dead years.

It is distance that creates nostalgia.

Non erano mai stati due in nessun altro posto, se non quando avevano fatto l'amore per la prima volta, fra l'erba alta e le ortiche al margine del bosco di Sarelle. - La camera azzurra

Do you recall Fred Merriville?" She stared at him. "Fred Merriville? Pray, what has he to say to anything?" "The poor fellow has nothing to say: he's dead, alas!

I cannot bear to go back alone - to the world I have lived in with you.