Quotes About Nostalgia

Faber sniffed the book. "Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy.

Dandelion Wine is nothing if it is not the boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the fields of the Lord on the green grass of other Augusts in the midst of starting to grow up, grow old, and sense darkness waiting under the trees to seed the blood. I

I memorized all of "John Carter" and "Tarzan," and sat on my grandparents' front lawn repeating the stories to anyone who would sit and listen. I would go out to that lawn on summer nights and reach up to the red light of Mars and say, "Take me home!" I yearned to fly away and land there in the strange dusts that blew over dead-sea bottoms toward the ancient cities.

There is no cause for nostalgia save the good and life-enhancing nostalgia for the present.

Mireasma fanului uscat si curgerea domoala a apei trezira in el dorinta de a se culca intr-o claie de fan proaspat, intr-un sopron singuratic, departe de autostrazile zgomotoase, in spatele vreunei ferme linistite, sub vreo moara veche de vant, care sa vuiasca lin, cu vuietul anilor ce trec. Ar sta treaz toata noaptea in sopronul acela, ascultand zvoana departata a jivinelor, ganganiilor si copacilor, freamatul si forfota lor marunta.

We got caught reading nights with flashlights under our sheets, right? So, nobody'll suspect an old jar of fireflies; folks'll think it's just a night museum.

Take it where you can find it, in old photograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself.

I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths. No one wanted them back. No one missed them.

Way late at night Will had heard—how often?—train whistles jetting steam along the rim of sleep, forlorn, alone and far, no matter how near they came. Sometimes he woke to find tears on his cheek, asked why, lay back, listened and thought, Yes! they make me cry, going east, going west, the trains of far gone in country deeps they drown in tides of sleep that escape the towns.

Watching the boys vanish away, Charles Halloway suppressed a sudden urge to run with them, make the pack. He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life. Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this, so the sadness could not hurt.

Sapete che i libri hanno un po'l'odore della noce moscata o di certe spezie d'origine esotica? Amavo annusarli, da ragazzo. Signore, quanti bei libri c'erano al mondo un tempo, prima che noi vi rinunciassimo!

Some summers refuse to end.

No front porches. My uncle says there used to be front porches. And people sat there sometimes at night, talking when they wanted to talk, rocking, and not talking when they didn't want to talk.

How strange the popsicle, the vanilla night, the night of close-packed ice cream, of mosquito-lotioned wrists, the night of running children suddenly veered from their games and put away behind glass, behind wood, the popsicles in melting puddles of lime and strawberry where they fell when the children were scooped indoors.

It smells boys ulcerating to be men, paining like great unwise wisdom teeth, twenty thousand miles away, summer abed in winter's night. It feels the aggravation of middle-aged men like myself, who gibber after long-lost August afternoons to no avail.

It became a game that I took to with immense gusto: to see how much I could remember about dandelions themselves, or picking wild grapes with my father and brother, rediscovering the mosquito-breeding ground rain barrel by the side bay window, or searching out the smell of the gold-fuzzed bees that hung around our back porch grape arbor. Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.

A trolley car, a pair of tennis shoes? These, at one time when we were children, were invested with magic for us.

He surveyed the lake of grass below, all the dandelions gone, a touch of rust in the trees, and the smell of Egypt blowing from the far east.

But now, falling here, with everything over, I'm not jealous of you anymore, because it's over for you as it is for me, and right now it's like it never was.

e-books smell like burned fuel

Funny, how funny, not to remember where or when you met your husband or wife.

Better than putting things in the attic you never use again. This way, you get to live the summer over for a minute or two here or there along the way through the winter, and when the bottles are empty the summer's gone for good and no regrets and no sentimental trash lying about for you to stumble over forty years from now. Clean, smokeless, efficient, that's dandelion wine. (page 266 in the 1975 hardback)

I see my grandfather there looking up at that strange drifting light, thinking his own still thoughts. I see me, my eyes filled with tears, because it was all over, the night was done, I knew there would never be another night like this.

Where strangers scanned each other's faces and found yesterday's sunrise instead of tomorrow's midnight.