Quotes About Nostalgia

I go to the movies a lot, and I regret when I see some actor that I used to like, to find them offering no more surprises.

Lord Frederick had been a stalwart member of the Montagne court since at least the time of my grandfather; this I knew. Even more, he had the marvellous ability to pull peppermint drops from my ears, which used to entertain me for hours.

The distance we set between ourselves and the events of our past life, which reduces their scale, the backlog of things we failed to notice at the time, the logic which connects them, which back then was invisible, the light shed on them by the epoch they belong to, which mankind already considers a moribund piece of history, their ultimate strangeness, which makes us look back on the person we were as though they were a different being, all these things conspire to turn our past into a dream.

I used to picture time as a rope you followed along, hand over hand, into the distance, but it's nothing like that. It moves outward but holds everything that's come before. Cut me open and I'm a tree trunk, rings of nostalgia radiating inward. All the years are nested inside me like I'm my own personal one-woman matryoshka doll. I guess that's true for everybody, but then I drive everybody crazy with my nostalgia and happiness. I am bittersweet personified.

There] was a time when a lot of people came to the door. The milkman. The iceman. The Fuller Brush man. Encyclopedia salesmen. There was a sense of interaction with the world that started right at your own front doorstep.

It's a good summer. A full one. With lots of good firsts. Which is good. Since it's the last.

multiple kids. They always need something, but everything is always happening at once. You know they need you, but there's never much time to follow through. And yet I was the one who'd wanted the big family. The bustling household. Because I'd been an only child, raised by parents who barely spoke, either to each other or to me. So I loved the commotion.

decided the situation had thrust me back into a childhood mode—made me feel like a kid again—and in that feeling, there were no tools to climb out of the discomfort, just as there had been no tools when I was young. And

It was so familiar now, that pain. He almost welcomed it. He'd almost missed it.

You have the memories, and you go over and over them in your mind. And after a time I wonder if I am remembering the actual event or just remembering the memories.

After a while you look at a picture and all it helps you remember is the picture. And then it gets kind of memorized and you hardly even see it.

She half stood, half floated in the water, absorbing the totality of Lance and Neal having so much shared history. So much life with each other that Roseanna knew nothing about. It felt as though someone had been watching her through one-way mirrored glass while staying safely anonymous and hidden himself. It also meant there was a great deal of her son's life that she had missed, but that much she'd known already. It just hurt to get a good look at it in retrospect.

I look back because I felt at home with May and Everett, as much as I ever have anywhere. I don't want that time to be gone. But it is gone, and even if I had not left, still it would be gone. Only for the time I was meant to be there could I feel so at peace.

I felt the kiss still there on my forehead. Literally. It was frozen there. I could still feel it. I wanted to bronze it, like people do with baby shoes. I wanted to mount it and hang it over my mantelpiece.

Those who haven't been in school for years may have forgotten the piercing and utter humiliation of almost anything your mother does there. Even if it's marginally acceptable by adult standards. I haven't been in school for years. University and graduate school not counting. And yet I remember.

Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect, all bound up together like a stack of cards. That is what it is like, the awful, wonderful brightness of Fairy colors. Try to smell the hard, pale wood sending up sharp, green smoke into the afternoon. To feel the mellow, golden sun on your skin, more gentle and cozier and more golden than even the light of your favorite reading nook at the close of the day.

You know how we can be about things which sparkle and shine. We imagine they will put back something of what has been lost.

Old things have strange hungers.

The nicest room you've ever lived in doesn't have to be clean and white or full of translucent fresh monkfish slices with pea shoots delicately balanced on top. It can just be the place you were happiest and safest from the wind.

I used to look up at night and dream of the solar system. I know, I know—who didn't? But your own dreams seem so special, so terribly yours, until you grow up and figure out they're just like everyone else's. How perfect and beautiful and silent and dead each planet hung in my heart! All nine names, written in squiggly, shaky handwriting, glowing inside me.

Hello old friend," he greeted it, "how strange for us to meet again, like this, with the snow blowing so outside." "You know my...my wrench?" "Of course I know it. It was not a wrench when we were last acquainted, but ones friends may change clothes and still one knows them.

I want to be myself again. I want to be six. I want to stop knowing everything I know.

Actors are liars. Writers, too. The whole lot of them, even the horn players and the fortune-tellers and the freaks and the strongmen. Even the ladies with rings in their noses and high heels on their feet playing violins all along the Pier and the lie they are all singing and dancing and saying is We can get the old world back again .

I expect everyone in Boston has something like that ring, which is why I am glad I have never been to Boston.