Quotes About Nostalgia

When I'm writing, I just kind of put myself in a place, in a certain time period in my life.

When I was 18, I took a trip to Thailand with a friend. We stayed for a month. Bangkok was very raw for a teenager: there were no cellphones, no Internet, and the only music I had with me was this cassette by Liz Phair. I was writing a lot of poetry, and she embodied a talky style of songwriting that I found very accessible.

When the dawn light is coursing through the slats in the shutters at last, making thin stripes on the floor, she, tossing, decides that for every human soul there must surely be a possible childhood worth living, but once it slips by, there isn't any reclaiming it or revising it.

What no one tells the young is to be careful of their childhoods. The memories from those days are the most compelling paintings in the mind--to which, with nostalgia or dread, you must ever return.

Sometimes thought Liir-his first thought in weeks and weeks-sometimes I hate this marvelous land of ours. It's so much like home, and then it holds out on you.

Happiness now sometimes meant turning away from what one remembered of earlier, better happiness.

Is it only in childhood that we are capable of taking in the whole world? What does it do to us that we briefly have that privilege? And, then, what harm , when the fund of novelty in human experience runs dry?

It's just that that was such a wonderful time, even in its strangeness and sadness-and life isn't the same now. It's wonderful, but it isn't the same.

How she wanted to put away adult things and go back to seeing through a looking-glass, darkly.

Your childhood, said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn't chosen to retail at drink parties. Her words lulled him. The past, even a bitter past, is usually more pungent than the present, or at least better organized in the mind.

Only, sometimes, in the text of a book here and there, we tap the page with a finger and say, "This is what my lost days were like. Something like this.

We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our license to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there's no place remotely like home.

I am forty. [...] I know who I am. The treachery of possibilities that threaten to swamp a young guy -- I negotiated them. I'm on the other side. The safe side. Why then do I remember the perilous moments with such fond affection?

And, once the innocence of childhood is lost, no adolescent has ever regained it.

The last light with any real warmth had been at home, long ago, in a place and a time that no longer existed, with people whose names he didn't say even inside his own mind.

There are times in the lives of most of us," observed William Edward Hartpole Lecky, "when we would have given all the world to be as we were but yesterday, though that yesterday had passed over us unappreciated and unenjoyed.

It struck me as poignant that my long relationship with my beloved grandparents could be embodied in a few small objects. But the power of objects doesn't depend on their volume; in fact, my memories were better evoked by a few carefully chosen items than by a big assortment of things with vague associations.

Studies show that recalling happy times helps boost happiness in the present. When people reminisce, they focus on positive memories, with the result that recalling the past amplifies the positive and minimizes the negative.

Waldenlust." This longing takes several forms: fantasies of the freedom that dispossession would bring; nostalgia for earlier, supposedly simpler times; and reverence for the primitive, which is assumed to be more authentic and closer to nature.

colorful tin trays from my grandmother? A friend confided

He felt a wistfulness for things lost and irretrievable.

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine Et nos amours Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne La joie venait toujours après la peine Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure Les jours s'en vont je demeure

I had the courage to look backward The ghosts of my days

How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.