Quotes About Nostalgia

The song finished playing, and Arlo remembered why it had resonated with so many people. It's nostalgic for something that isn't real, and it's sad about that. Everybody's nostalgic for glory days that never happened.

In our dreams we are always young.

I reread my favorite books to make sure they're still perfect, but rereading them wears away at their perfection.

I knew I was grown up when I spent time with them and felt not just the weight of my old memories but the weight of theirs, from when they were children.

I like to visit with the exhausted girl who once was me

I hadn't remembered that in decades. That particular quiet.

I never joined Facebook because I want to preserve my old longings. And also yours.

My own girlhood felt like something from 1650 even when it was happening. The little parties, kindnesses done by friends, the light as I walked home from school. Pine needles. I spent those days feeling half-there, not quite committed to that life.

Time is a beautiful thing. It's like when you meet an old lover on the street six years later and they don't look so ugly anymore.

I miss my fox-headed brother. Keeper

My roses still bloom, for I will not let them fade, but the weeping willows have choked out the cherry trees, and all the chrysanthemums and snapdragons have become love-lies-bleeding and anemones and hydrangeas of the deepest indigo blue. You are missed, my only violet.

The room looked exactly as it had looked when I left the Siddons house for good at the age of eighteen, as if the intervening years had never happened, as if my escape had been nothing but a dream.

I was, but then I realized that I was holding on to something that didn't exist anymore. That the person I missed didn't exist anymore. People change. The things we like and dislike change. And we can wish they couldn't all day long but that never works.

It had also affected the old fishermen's hard complexions, until one fancied that when Death claimed them it could only be with the aid, not of any slender modern dart, but the good serviceable harpoon of a seventeenth century woodcut.

The road was new to me, as roads always are, going back.

In the life of each of us there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness.

She hears the word bell, or orchard, or swallow, and she experiences a strange surprise, like the feel of a coin in the soil. These words make her wistful; they overwhelm her with longing. Not for her orchard, nor the bell in her church, nor the swallows that nest in the eaves of her house. For something else altogether, something she would have forgotten completely. She wonders: Why should these words pierce me, if they are not the remains of a currency I once knew how to spend?

But that's what I mean: you're Ms. Hempel forever. At least to us.

In these fast and fickle times, it's nice to know that there are some things you can always count on: the enduring brilliance of the last page of The Great Gatsby; the near-religious harmonies of the Beach Boys' "California Girls"; and the lifelong friendship of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

My locket hangs in my closet beside the glass, the only shining thing among so many shadows.

For she was the only one, of all of them, to have spared me a pleasant word; and suddenly I longed for time to pass, not for its own sake, but as it would take me back to her.

Did she remember, how we laughed and blushed? 'Pa used to say your face was like the red heart on a playing card--mine, he said, was like the diamond. Do you remember, Helen, how Pa said that?

Or were those trifles all you had? Oughtn't you, precisely, to preserve them? To make little crystal drops of them, that you could keep, like charms on a bracelet, to tell against danger when next it came?

It was done the day you took me to that house in Bryanston Square, she said. Or even, the time before that, when you bought me tea. We stood in the sun, and you closed your eyes and I looked at your face...I think it was done then, Julia.