Quotes About Nostalgia

It's like a kid standing at the window watching the rain.

I would never see her again, except in memory. She was here, and now she's gone. There is no middle ground. Probably is a word that you may find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.

The song is over. But the melody lingers on.

Sometimes you're just the sweetest thing. Like Christmas, summer vacation, and a brand-new puppy rolled into one.

Music has that power to revive memories, sometimes so intensely that they hurt. But

Sometimes when I'm with you, I remember things I lost when I was your age. Like I remember the sound of the rain and the smell of the wind.

You know what I think? she says. That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper.

Her voice was like a line from an old black-and-white Jean-Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness.

Imagine The Greatest Hits of Bobby Darin minus 'Mack the Knife.' That's what my life would be like without you.

Nah, I shook my head, things that come out of nowhere go back to nowhere, that's all. We fell silent again. The thing we had shared was nothing more than a fragment of time that had died long ago. Even so, a faint glimmer of that warm memory still claimed a part of my heart. And when death claimed me, no doubt I would walk along by that faint light in the brief instant before being flung once again into the abyss of nothingness.

But it's strange, isn't it? Eri said. What is? That amazing time in our lives is gone, and will never return. All the beautiful possibilities we had then have been swallowed up in the flow of time.

You know what I think? she says. That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.

Music has that power to revive memories, sometimes so intensely that they hurt.

Were the stars out when I left the house last evening? All I could remember was the couple in the Skyline listening to Duran Duran. Stars? Who remembers stars? Come to think of it, had I even looked up at the sky recently? Had the stars been wiped out of the sky three months ago, I wouldn't have known.

It was a small room with dim light coming in the window, reminiscent of old Polish films.

Only the dead stay 17 forever.

Even now, whenever I think of her, I envision a quiet Sunday morning. A gentle, clear day, just getting under way. No homework to do, just a Sunday when you could do what you wanted. She always gave me this kick-back-and-relax, Sunday-morning kind of feeling.

No matter how vivid a memory, the power of time was stronger. I knew this instinctively.

I'm all through as a human being," she said. "All you're looking at is the lingering memory of what I used to be. The most important part of me, what used to be inside, died years ago, and I'm just functioning by rote memory.

I, too, remember that feeling. You are caught between all that was and all that must be. You feel lost.

All of a sudden out of nowhere I can bring back things I haven't thought about for years. It's pretty interesting. Memory is so crazy! It's like we've got these drawers crammed with tons of useless stuff. Meanwhile, all the really important things we just keep forgetting, one after the other.

On any given day, something can come along and steal our hearts. It may be any old thing: a rosebud, a lost cap, a favorite sweater from childhood, an old Gene Pitney record. A miscellany of trivia with no home to call their own. Lingering for two or three days, that something soon disappears, returning to the darkness. There are wells, deep wells, dug in our hearts. Birds fly over them. -from Pinball, 1973

As time passes, memory, inevitably, reconstitutes itself.

not everything was lost in the flow of time [.....]we truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something - with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish.