Quotes About Nostalgia

few things, I assure you, will devastate like the might-have-beens).

He led her past a beaded curtain and into a private back room. The room was gold and green and looked like a Midwest cheerleader uniform had inspired the décor. "You

What do you want me to say, Jess? We were together a long time. Of course there was a pang.

She frowned, again hating herself for the sentimentality, but maybe she should cut herself some slack. She tried to find the very spot where she had been standing that day, checking her bearings by using the house, moving a few feet left, then right, until she was certain, yes, this was the spot where that tender kiss took place. She

You have very few perfect moments in your life, moments you want to put in a box and stick on the top shelf so that when you're alone, you can take the box down and open it up again. That

But that was twenty years ago, and with the exception of EQMM (still indisputably the fountainhead of significant mystery fiction throughout the civilized world), most of the magazines I listed above are dead. Crumbling yellow pulp relics in my files, dropping brittle little triangles from page corners.

We said good-bye, and Dill went inside the house. He evidently remembered he was engaged to me, for he ran back out and kissed me swiftly in front of Jem. Yawl write, hear? he bawled after us.

I had never thought about it, but summer was Dill by the fishpool smoking string, Dill's eyes alive with complicated plans to make Boo Radley emerge; summer was the swiftness with which Dill would reach up and kiss me when Jem was not looking, the longings we sometimes felt each other feel. With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable

We saw Uncle Jack every Christmas, and every Christmas he yelled across the street for Miss Maudie to come marry him. Miss Mauide would yell back, Call a little louder, Jack Finch, and they'll hear you the post office, I haven't heard you yet! Jem and I thought this a strange way to ask for a lady's hand in marriage, but then again Uncle Jack was rather strange.

Thereafter the summer passed in routine contentment. Routine contentment was: improving our treehouse that rested between giant twin chinaberry trees in the back yard, fussing, running through our list of dramas based on the works of Oliver Optic, Victor Appleton, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. (...) Thus we came to know Dill as a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies.

If Dill were here he would leap over the fence to her, bring her head down to his, kiss her, and hold her hand, and together they would take their stand when there was trouble in the house. But Dill had long since gone from her.

I could not remember when the lines above Atticus's moving finger separated into words, but I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow—anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read.

Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o-clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft tea-cakes with frosting of sweat and sweet talcolm.

Hell is eternal apartness. What had she done that she must spend the rest of her years reaching out with yearning for them, making secret trips to long ago, making no journey to the present?

What made you think of Dill?" she asked. "I don't know. Just thought of him." "You never liked him, did you?" Henry smiled. "I was jealous of him. He had you and Jem to himself all summer long, while I had to go home the day school was out. There was nobody at home to fool around with.

L'estate significava per me Dill accanto alla vasca dei pesci che fumava sigarette di canapa; significava gli occhi di Dill che brillavano mentre almanaccava complicati progetti per stanare Boo Radley; l'estate significava Dill che mi baciava, rapido, quando Jem non ci guardava, significava le nostalgie che ciascuno di noi provava e che l'altro intuiva: con lui la vita era normale; senza di lui, insopportabile.

His lips parted into a timid smile, and our neighbor's image blurred with my sudden tears. "Hey, Boo," I said.

Aunty said no, that's where we got our small hands and feet.

She looked at Maycomb, and her throat tightened: Maycomb was looking back at her.

He is an incredible man, she thought. A chapter of his life comes to a close, Atticus tears down the old house and builds a new one in a new section of town. I couldn't do it. They built an ice cream parlor where the old one was. Wonder who runs it?

My memory stirred.

People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County.

I didn't go overseas, but I saw a lot of this country. I didn't have the itch to get back, so after the war I stayed away for ten years, but the longer I stayed away the more I missed Maycomb. I got to the point where I felt like I had to come back or die. You never get it out of your bones.

No, don't tell me, let me tell you: you had a marvelous time but you wouldn't dream of living there.