Quotes About Nostalgia

often she had seemed to herself to be moving among those vanished figures of old books and pictures, an invisible ghost among the living, better acquainted with them than with her own friends. she very nearly lost consciousness that she was a separate being, with a future of her own.

He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.

for women live much more in the past...they attach themselves to places;

it is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams

O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!

With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets—what nonsense was he thinking? She was fifty at least: she had eight children. Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen: with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair—He took her bag.

Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.

The strange thing on looking back was the purity, the integrity of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one's feeling for a man.

At the moment I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.

kindling all over with pleasure at the thought of the past.

The summer is put away folded up in the drawer with other summers.

If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills - than my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory.

Had they not been taken, she asked, to circuses when they were children? Never, he answered, as if she asked the very thing he wanted; had been longing all these days to say, how they did not go to circuses.

I come home—and I have a feeling of returning like a ghost to its haunt.

Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees, ... one's happiness, one's reality?

Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older! or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters. Nothing made up for the loss. When she read just now to James, and there were numbers of soldiers with kettle-drums and trumpets, and his eyes darkened, she thought, why should they grow up, and lose all that?

What people had shed and left--a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes--those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again.

Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair— He took her bag.

Strolling through those colleges past those ancient halls the roughness of the present seemed smoothed away; the body seemed contained in a miraculous glass cabinet through which no sound could penetrate, and the mind, freed from any contact with facts

But suddenly it would come over her, if he were with me now what would he say? Some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning–indeed they did.

The very reason why the poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now. But

The very reason why the poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now.

These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device - a means of summing up and making a knot of innumerable little threads. Innumerable threads were there; still, if I stopped to disentangle, I could collect a number. But whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past.