Quotes About Nostalgia

I remember my mom had a big collection of copies of Saturday Evening Post magazines, and that was really my introduction to those great illustrators.

Is the child in that old photograph really an erstwhile version of you, your little hand waving farewell? The face of that child is nothing like the face you have now. That child's face is now melding with the blackness behind you, before you, around you. The child is waving and smiling and fading as your car keeps skidding toward your abruptly curtailed future. Bye-bye.

Tapping a little bell, I leaned on the desk and turned to look at a small, traditionally decorated Christmas tree on a table near the entranceway. It was complete with shiny, egg-fragile bulbs; miniature candy canes; flat, laughing Santas with arms wide; a star on top nodding awkwardly against the delicate shoulder of an upper branch; and colored lights that bloomed out of flower-shaped sockets. For some reason this seemed to me a sorry little piece.

Children have made me nervous ever since I stopped being one of them.

We have no parlors anymore, no hearthsides. We have, rather, our family rooms in which light flickers from the widescreen multichannel TV on which we watch reruns of a life we are not familiar with. Kitchens are not cooked in, dining rooms go dusty. Living rooms are a kind of mausolea reserved for "company" that seldom comes.

I had this theory. It was based loosely on the unremarkable observation that the old are always looking back with longing while the young, with the same longing, look ahead. One man remembers what the other imagines.

When we bury the old, we bury the known past, the past we imagine sometimes better than it was, but the past all the same, a portion of which is inhabited. Memory is the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort.

I have a picture of the Pont Neuf on a wall in my apartment, but i know that Paris is really on the closet shelf, in the box next to the sleeping bag, with the rest of my diaries.

Oft in the stilly night,Ere Slumber's chain has bound me,Fond Memory brings the lightOf other days around me;The smiles, the tears,Of boyhood's years,The words of love then spoken;The eyes that shoneNow dimmed and gone,The cheerful hearts now broken.

'Tis the last rose of summer,Left blooming alone;All her lovely companionsAre faded and gone.

The harp that once through Tara's hallsThe soul of music shed,Now hangs as mute on Tara's wallsAs if that soul were fled.

Go where we may, rest where we will, Eternal London haunts us still.

You may not have noticed, but men over retirement age seem to have a lot of clothes of an earlier vintage." "Yep," he said. "We're all timing it to wear them out at the moment of death so everything comes out even.

it's good when one feels the affections of the past. They are among the lasting things—they will never leave us. And as Lady had told me, never is a long, long time.

Then summer fades and passes, and October comes. Will smell smoke then, and feel an unsuspected sharpness, a thrill of nervous, swift elation, a sense of sadness and departure.

You can't go home again

But why had he always felt so strongly the magnetic pull of home, why had he thought so much about it and remembered it with such blazing accuracy, if it did not matter, and if this little town, and the immortal hills around it, was not the only home he had on earth? He did not know. All that he knew was that the years flow by like water, and that one day men come home again.

There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night.

In the early summer of 1902 John Barrington

I'll be scalded and tarred if a man can't get a little welcome when he comes home. Well, Maggie, you old gunny-sack, how's the broken down old weather hen?—Sabina, old fishbait, old skunkpot.—And the children,—how've the little smellers been?

Wir kommen aus einer Welt, in der wir unglaubliche Maßstäbe der Vollkommenheit gekannt haben, und erinnern uns deutlich der Schönheiten, die wir nie festzuhalten vermochten, und kehren wieder in jene Welt zurück.

I want you to try and remember what it was like to have been very young. And particularly the days when you were first in love; when you were like a person sleepwalking, and you didn't quite see the street you were in, and didn't quite hear everything that was said to you. You're just a little bit crazy. Will you remember that, please?

Standing on my own, remembering the one I left at home, forget about the life I used to know, forget about the one I left at home

but her mind feels feverish as it races through the crowded hallways of the past