Quotes About Nostalgia

He and I had always felt as if we were fellow survivors from some vanishing age or land, in the gibbering swamp of mediocrity around us.

Él sonrió, no del todo a ella, sino como divertido ante un repentino recuerdo suyo.

He realized that he was thinking of his past, as if certain days of it were spread before him, demanding to be seen again.

You get a strange feeling when you leave a place, like you'll not only miss the people you love, but you miss the person you are at this time and place because you'll never be the same again

This is Tehran for me: its absences were more real than its presences.

the dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became.

Col senno di poi, sono contenta di non essermi resa conto di quanto fossi vulnerabile: ero come l'ambasciatore di un paese inesistente, venuta a reclamare, con la mia piccola collezione di libri e la mia sporta di sogni, un paese che credevo mi appartenesse.

Between my first book tour, in 2003, and the next one, in 2009, many of the places I visited had undergone a significant transformation or vanished: Cody's in Berkeley, seven branch libraries in Philadelphia, twelve of the fourteen bookstores in Harvard Square, Harry W. Schwartz in Milwaukee and, in my own hometown of Washington, D.C., Olsson's and Chapters.

We in ancient countries have our past--we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.

the worlds that they thought they'd left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been.

As I chewed on the gooey popcorn, looking out at the lake, calm and turquoise now, I tried to recall a more contented moment

And there was the time Paul McCartney serenaded my wife with "Michelle." She laughed, a little embarrassed, as the rest of the audience applauded, and I wondered what Michelle's parents would have said back in 1965, the year the song came out, if someone had knocked on the door of their South Side home and told them that someday the Beatle who wrote it would be singing it to their daughter from a White House stage.

I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped, booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack though

The mood on the plane was bittersweet.

I wanted to think that she did look back, that she'd reveled in the memory of a long ago lover, or a perfect sun lit day in her youth when she'd experienced a bit of good fortune and the world had revealed itself to be big and full of promise.

I married the first man I ever kissed. When I tell my children that, they just about throw up.

Maybe it wasn't about needing them. People hold on to all kinds of things, silly things, even broken things, because of the memories attached to them.

And so I sit on the dunes in my carefully mismatched clothes, hour after hour, day after day, frozen in my looking back. 'Do not look behind you...lest you be swept away.' That is what scripture say. Only there is nowhere for me to look but back. No future. No redemption. Like Lot's wife, I am turned to salt, my tired eyes trained on the blue-gray horizon, where sea meets sky, where my yesterday's met my tomorrows, a ragtag eccentric, watching and waiting for something that never comes.

Only a fool wants to go back to the land of childhood . . . Or perhaps it is the longing for the certainties of childhood that makes a man a fool.

In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.

But time passed and eventually my mind had only one thought in it as regards childhood. For any kid that gets that as an option: take that sweet thing and run with it. Hide. Love it so hard. Because it's going to fucking leave you and not come back.

It lasted just a moment, whatever that is. One held breath? An ant's afternoon? It was brief, I can promise that much, for although it's been many years now since my children ruled my life, a mother recalls the measure of the silences.

Many of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.

Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what's not in it.