Quotes About Nostalgia

women live much more in the past than we do, he thought. They attach themselves to places; and their fathers – a woman's always proud of her father.

odd, he thought, how the thought of childhood keeps coming back to me. The result of seeing Clarissa, perhaps; for women live much more in the past than we do, he thought.

Pareva più il ricordo del dolore che il dolore stesso.

Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.

The very reason why that 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.

That was the worst of growing up, she thought; they couldn't share things as they used to share them.

As a child he had walked in Regent's Park—odd, he thought, hope the thought of childhood keeps coming back to me—the result of seeing Clarissa, perhaps; for women live much more in the past than we do, he thought. They attach themselves to places: and their fathers—a woman's always proud of her father.

They would, she thought, going on again, however long they lived, come back to this night; this moon; this wind; this house: and to her too. It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven...

Quién no piensa en el pasado en un jardín con hombres y mujeres tumbados bajo los árboles? ¿Acaso estos hombres y mujeres, estos fantasmas tumbados bajo los árboles, no son nuestro pasado, todo lo que queda de él..., nuestra felicidad, nuestra realidad?

Bond Street la fascinaba; Bond Street muy de mañana en plena temporada; sus banderas ondeando; sus tiendas; sin excesos; sin resplandor; un rollo de tweed en la tienda donde su padre se había comprado los trajes durante cincuenta años; unas cuantas perlas; el salmón encima de un taco de hielo.

And so she went down and said to her husband, Why must they grow up and lose it all? Never will they be so happy again.

I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.

One is always at home in one's past...

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

but that mimosa grove - the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since. this then is my story. i have reread it. it has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. at this or that twist of it i feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than i care to probe.

I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window.… Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.

Life with you was lovely—and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink 'v' in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering 'l.' Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die, now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too.

memory can restore to life everything except smells, although nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces.

Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive.

When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of some impeccably narrowing corridor.

The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait.

The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.