Quotes About Nostalgia

The rolling sound of a good hymn badly sung is particularly evocative.

We are committed to the past as we need and want it to be; we are no longer interested in the past as it was.

My old friend has gained weight. His shirt is wrinkled and his hair is too long. We clamp hands on each other and trade kisses on the cheek, holding on longer than we should, because as the distance has grown, so has the enthusiasm of our greetings. Someday we will be the greatest of strangers.

It was one of those Septembers when it seemed that the summer would never end.

There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.

It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia.

The conversation had turned again to those moments, by now enriched by a private mythology, when they first set eyes on each other

You may never have experienced, or you will have forgotten, a good burgundy (her favourite) or a good Sancerre (also her favourite) decanted through a healthy placenta.

She knew enough to recognize that memories were crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They wouldn't let him speak. She would never know what scenes were driving that turmoil.

But on this particular morning, weary of books and birdsong and country peace, Edward took his rickety childhood bike from the shed, raised the saddle, pumped up the tired and set off with no particular plan. He had a pound note and two half crowns in his pocket and all he wanted was forward movement.

He did not want to see her photograph and discover what the years had wrought, or hear about the details of her life. He preferred to preserve her as she was in his memories, with the dandelion in her buttonhole and the piece of velvet in her hair, the canvas bag across her shoulder, and the beautiful strong-boned face with its wide and artless smile.

At times this biography made him comfortably nostalgic for a verdant, horse-drawn, affectionate England; at others he was faintly depressed by the way a whole life could be contained by a few hundred pages - bottled, like homemade chutney. And by how easily an existence, its ambitions, networks of family and friend, all its cherished stuff, solidly possessed, could so entirely vanish.

But the crowded recent past can be difficult to recall.

Teddy Bear' by Elvis Presley, I can remember, I have always been able to remember

All day long, she realized, she had been feeling strange, and seeing strangely, as though everything was already long in the past, made more vivid by posthumous ironies she could not quite grasp.

But there was that essence everyone forgets when a love recedes into the past—how it was, how it felt and tasted to be together through seconds, minutes and days, before everything that was taken for granted was discarded then overwritten by the tale of how it all ended, and then by the shaming inadequacies of memory. Paradise or

It was a chilly sensation, growing up.

She had never lost that childhood pleasure in seeing pages covered in her own handwriting.

But there was that essence everyone forgets when a love recedes into the past—how it was, how it felt and tasted to be together through seconds, minutes and days, before everything that was taken for granted was discarded then overwritten by the tale of how it all ended, and then by the shaming inadequacies of memory.

Bird's Custard Powder.

Do you know what most people have from their grandmother? A tea set. Or a quilt." Curran smiled. "If your family had a quilt, it would be made out of chimera skin and stuffed with feathers from dead angels.

Aaahh. Home. My place, my smells, my familiar rug under my feet, my kitchen, my Curran in the kitchen chair . . . Wait a damn minute.

Strawberry Shortcake called, she wants her outfit back

One of my most vivid memories of the mid-1950s is of crying into a washbasin full of soapy grey baby clothes - there were no washing machines - while my handsome and adored husband was off playing football in the park on Sunday morning with all the delightful young men who had been friends to both of us at Cambridge three years earlier.