Quotes About Nostalgia

The apartment was entirely, was only, for her; a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked. She had kept some books...which suggested to her that she was, or might be, a person of seriousness, a thinker in some seeping, ubiquitous way; and she had kept, too, a handful of children's books...that conjured for her an earlier, passionately earnest self.

I instead was reminded of watching my cousins at Thanksgiving through my own front windows, that strange sense of distance, even where you should belong.

But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you'll never truly be at home again. What you've left behind exists only in your memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you've left behind at every stop.

But our friendship was, at the same time, like a city you hadn't visited in a long time, where you know the streets by heart but the shops and restaurants have changed, so you can find your way from the church to the town square, no problem, but you don't know where to get ice cream or a decent sandwich.

Time, since that day has remained still. And I've dreamt of you and the sky, since that day...

an inevitable truth of life: Not every foodie memory is a good foodie memory).

He stood and watched his friend hobble around the house, felt the cold claw of loneliness reach out and touch him with icy fingers. A terrible loneliness. The loneliness of age—of age and the outdated.

I don't remember nineteen," Will said. "Or twenty, come to that. I have a very vague recollection of twenty-one—" He laughed. "But you get to a place when you're so high you're not high anymore.

A feeling of intense loss overwhelmed him for a moment as he thought of his once-charmed life—of love, and magic, and friends, all of it, and all of them, dead.

You should see the latest computer-generated movies featuring the long-gone old stars with the new. I've watched the video of Arizona Sunset at least a dozen times. Who plays the leads? Humphrey Bogart, Lionel Barrymore, Marilyn Monroe, Julia Roberts, and Tom Cruise. It's so real, you'd swear they all acted together on the set.

Julia tensed as she looked through the steering wheel of the Model J Duesenberg and saw the needle creep up and waver at seventy miles an hour. This car doesn't have seat belts. They didn't believe in them in 1929.

No oil or water leaks. Don't push the Stutz too hard. We may have rebuilt the engine, but it's over sixty years old. And you can't buy spare Stutz parts at Pep Boys.

Look at the memory on the turtle!

You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions.

The I-Remember-Whensters lumbered in with their musty catalogues of the bygone, dragging IVs of distilled nostalgia behind them on creaky wheels

Cora adored the old almanacs for containing the entire world.

I was nostalgic for everything big and small. Nostalgic for what never happened and nostalgic about what will be, looking forward to looking back on a time when things got easier.

Every kid had heard of Fun Town, been there or envied someone who had. In the third cut on side A, Dr. King spoke of how his daughter longed to visit the amusement park on Stewart Avenue in Atlanta. Yolanda begged her parents whenever

He stopped watching the movie a few years later when he realized he didn't watch it because it was sort of corny, or they got the facts wrong, or it marked how far he had come, but because watching it made him sad, and a nutjob part of him sought out that sadness.

When he heard autumn leaves skuttling in the wind, he remembered that chuckle.

Memory is the past with volume control.

Twenty years is a while. They were both older, fatter, and sadder--which is the general trajectory--and that was a nice couple of days.

She flickered then, as Ruby had that morning, and he saw her as she was on that rainy afternoon under his umbrella: almond-shaped dark eyes under long lashes, delicate in her pink cardigan, edges of her mouth upturned at one of her strange jokes. Unaware of the effect she had on people. On him, all these years later.