Quotes About Nostalgia

Even painful memories are ties that bind.

During the twenty years of Odesseus' absence, the people of Ithaca retained many recollections of him but never felt nostalgia for him. Whereas Odysseus did suffer nostalgia, and remembered almost nothing. ..... For four long books of the Odyssey he had retraced in detail his adventures before the dazzled Phaeacians. But in Ithaca he was not a stranger, he was one of their own, so it never occurred to anyone to say, 'Tell us!

A scarf from her dress works free and floats behind her the way memories float behind the dead.

Mesmerized, all she can do is watch this piece of her life move off; all she can do is watch it and suffer. She is experiencing a brand-new feeling called nostalgia. That feeling, that irrepressible yearning to return, suddenly reveals to her the existence of the past, the power of the past, of her past; in the house of her life […] from now on her existence will be inconceivable without these feelings.

I imagine the feelings of two people meeting after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That's where the misunderstanding starts: they don't, have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don't intersect.

Whenever I think about ancient cultures nostalgia seizes me. Perhaps this is nothing but envy of the sweet slowness of the history of that time. The era of ancient Egyptian culture lasted for several thousand years; the era of Greek antiquity for almost a thousand. In this respect, a single human life imitates the history of mankind; at first it is plunged into immobile slowness, and then only gradually does it accelerate more and more.

In the sunet of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia.

The stronger their nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes.

She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death.

Whoever wishes to remember must not stay in one place, waiting for the memories to come of their own accord! Memories are scattered all over the immense world, and it takes voyaging to find them and make them leave their refuge.

He knew very well that his memory detested him, that it did nothing but slander him; therefore he tried not to believe it and to be more lenient toward his own life. But that didn't help: he took no pleasure in looking back, and he did it as seldom as possible.

when she looked longer at herself in her new dress, it was she but she living a different life, the life she would have lived if she had stayed in Prague.

She felt happy in Paris, happier than here, but only Prague held her by a secret bond of beauty.

He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realized that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them.

Nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there.

If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency.

Con ello no quiero decir que haya dejado de amarla, que la haya olvidado, que su recuero haya empalidecido; al contrario; permanece dentro de mí constantemente como una callada nostalgia; la anhelo como se anhela algo que se ha perdido definitivamente.

The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.

Vê um jovem que se afasta da vida dela e se vai, parra sempre inacessível. Hipnotizada, nada pode fazer senão olhar esse pedaço da sua vida que se afasta, não pode senão olhá-lo e sofrer. Experimenta uma sensação inteiramente nova que se chama nostalgia.

Plus vaste est le temps que nous avons laissé derrière nous, plus irrésistible est la voix qui nous invite au retour

The life we've left behind us has a bad habit of stepping out of the shadows, of bringing complaints to us, of taking us to court.

The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it. This pronouncement seems to state the obvious and yet it is false. Men grow old, the end grows near, each moment becomes more and more valuable and there is no time to waste on recollection. It's important to understand the mathematical paradox in nostalgia, that it is most powerful in early youth , when the volume of life that has passed is quite small.

Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

an old villa surrounded by a garden looked to them like the image of a comforting home, the dream of an idyll long past.