Quotes About Nostalgia

I opened my door and everything they had for me was tainted because the land of Used-to-Be is just full of ghosts starving for your breath.

That's what a map is, you know. Just a memory. Just a wish to go back home - someday, somehow.

Some kinds of hurt almost feel good, you know? Familiar. Like an ugly couch in your parents' house with the springs all bare where your daddy slapped you once for coming home late and now when you sleep on it it's like one of those Indian fellas napping on nails but it makes you feel like you come from somewhere. Hurts like home.

One is always homesick for places where one came to grief.

How poor you are, September. You make my heart groan. I know about Homesickness. It begins with H. What will you do?

Let it be over", she pleaded within herself. "Let it never have happened—any of it. Let me be young again, and the story just starting.

You never feel so grown up as when you are eleven, and never so young and unsure as when you are forty. That

What the sign meant. To lose your heart. When I go home, I shall leave mine here, and I don't think I shall ever have it back." -September

All these years I've had a story in my mind, the story about us that never really existed. And because of that story, I've kept you framed up on the wall in a little box of nostalgic moonlight.

there had been the two little boys. Now they were gone, too. They loved her and called her and sent her e-mails and would still snuggle up to her to be petted when they were in the mood, but they were men, and though they would always be at the center of her life, she was no longer at the center of theirs.

But Fin would always be a bit of a romantic, at least when it came to books.

she was yearning to be with her grandparents now.

Hollywood, an industry that shapes not only our national but global memories, has been the most reactionary cultural perpetrator of white nostalgia, stuck in a time loop and refusing to acknowledge that America's racial demographic has radically changed since 1965. Movies are cast as if the country were still "protected" by a white supremacist law that guarantees that the only Americans seen are carefully curated European descendants.

Childhood is a state of mind, whether it's a nostalgic return to innocence or a sudden flashback to unease and dread. If the innocence of childhood is being protected and comforted, the precarity of childhood is when one feels the least protected and comfortable.

Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom is just one of countless contemporary films, works of literature, pieces of music, and lifestyle choices where wishing for innocent times means fetishizing an era when the nation was violently hostile to anyone different.

If to look back is tinted with the honeyed cinematography of nostalgia, to look sideways at childhood is tainted with the sicklier haze of envy, an envy that ate at me when I stayed for dinner with my white friend's family or watched the parade of commercials and TV shows that made it clear what a child should look like and what kind of family they should grow up in.

Despite the violent turbulence of that year, Anderson, who was born in 1969, imbues his film with a manufactured, blinkered, pastiched nostalgia that the theorist Lauren Berlant defines as "a small-town one that holds close and high a life that never existed, one that provides a screen memory to cover earlier predations of inequality.

Odd how being away could teach you about home.

Memories were fine but you couldn't touch them, smell them or hold them. They were never exactly as the moment was, and they faded with time.

Memories were fine but you couldn't touch them, smell them or hold them. They were never exactly as the moment was, and they faded with time.

It's too late," she said, her voice trembling. "You are not the beautiful innocent vagabond walking toward me under the dogwood blossoms, with his trunks and his head full of worthless notions. And I am not the beloved, cherished ladies' maid...

Marse Willa Viley

Margaret, are you grievingOver Goldengrove unleaving?

Aw, dad... this isn't another one of those "oh, you're LUCKY you didn't have to peck dry corn and uncooked rice off the dirt!" kind of thing is it?