Quotes About Nostalgia

Perhaps you've owned something in your life to which you ascribed particular pleasure. A treasured toy, perhaps. Some photographs. The steel skull of your archnemesis. Now

Which was more potent? The pain of memory, or the pain of forgetting? He

In the window I see our ghosts against the black gloss of glass. She put her arm around me, and I think how we maybe never left the business end.

I was born in this country and I have never very much wanted to leave. I remember Pop's dead eyes looking at me. They were real dry, and that took something out of me. From Trilobites

Writer Mary Jo Putney says, "What one loves in childhood stays in the heart forever.

What makes this constant assessing and comparing so self-defeating is that we are often comparing our lives, our marriages, our families, and our communities to unattainable, media-driven visions of perfection, or we're holding up our reality against our own fictional account of how great someone else has it. Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison.

What's wrong with feeling nostalgic? It's the only distraction left for those who have no faith in the future." Nostalgia can be a dangerous distraction, and it can underpin a feeling of resignation or hopelessness after a fall.

my life has a soundtrack. And the songs from that soundtrack can stir memories and provoke emotion in me like nothing else.

We define nostalgia as a yearning for the way things used to be in our often idealized and self-protective version of the past.

The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before.

Interestingly, nostalgia is more likely to be triggered by negative moods, like loneliness, and by our struggles to find meaning in our current lives.

it's important to reality-check our nostalgic ideas by uncovering and examining the tradeoffs and contradictions that are often deeply buried in all of our memories. Were the comfort and safety of that past existence real? If so, were they at someone else's expense?

Grilled peaches on shortbread with raspberries and black pepper ice cream. We're all out, said the communicative waiter. That was twelve years ago.

In my childhood I could remember the whole week a damn sight better than I can now for all my family were in the Rising. And they told the stories to such good effect that I was in there with them… Now I have learned enough arithmetic to know that I could not possibly have taken part in an event which happened seven years before I was born, and it saddens me.

The past was a bridge that looked solid and sturdy, but once you were on it, you saw that it extended only far enough to strand you, to suspend you between loss and longing with nowhere to go at all.

I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to I hate to read new books, and I hollered Comrade! to whoever owned it before me.

If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much.

All my life I've wanted to see London. [...] I wanted to see London the way old people want to see home before they die.

Men kan nooit werkelijk een plek-van-vroeger terug vinden, of een voorbije staat van zijn opnieuw beleven. Er is ooit een toestand van volmaakt geluk geweest die men in de loop van de tijd onophoudelijk verliest, vergeet. Toch blijft men geloveen dat die ergens in het verleden verzonken is en hervonden kan worden.

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived. The odors of fruits waft me to my southern home, to my childhood frolics in the peach orchard. Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief. Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that start awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening fields far away.

In those days you did not really need anything, not even the rabbit's foot, but it was good to feel it in your pocket.

We're living as if we were in mourning for a lost paradise, he thought. As if we longed for the car thieves and safecrackers of the old days, who doffed their caps and behaved like gentlemen when we came to take them in. But those days have irretrievably vanished, and it's questionable whether they were ever as idyllic as we remember them.

A woman would have never been able to live in a house with no pictures of her family

It struck Wallander that nothing could make him as depressed as the sight of old spectacles that nobody wanted anymore.