Quotes About Wistfulness

It is distance that creates nostalgia.

A certain cynicism, born of the life she has led; a streak of strange wisdom; the wistfulness behind the gaiety; sometimes fear; and nearly always the memory of loneliness that hurts the soul.

My own girlhood felt like something from 1650 even when it was happening. The little parties, kindnesses done by friends, the light as I walked home from school. Pine needles. I spent those days feeling half-there, not quite committed to that life.

She hears the word bell, or orchard, or swallow, and she experiences a strange surprise, like the feel of a coin in the soil. These words make her wistful; they overwhelm her with longing. Not for her orchard, nor the bell in her church, nor the swallows that nest in the eaves of her house. For something else altogether, something she would have forgotten completely. She wonders: Why should these words pierce me, if they are not the remains of a currency I once knew how to spend?

She wished for a moment that they were all children again. It still seemed extraordinary to her, that everything had turned out the way it had.

That is how you know you've left childhood behind-when you wish for time to go backward.

Looking back, I wish I could bottle the stuff that made it better, but how can one bottle time?

Esprit de l'escalier: spirit of the staircase, wishing you'd said, wishing you'd done. Yet how much more indelible it was when the staircase was the staircase that led to the bedroom.

She bit her lower lip hard and blinked her eyes. There was such wistfulness and longing in his voice. Oh, she was going to give him back his eyes, or the next best thing, if it took her the rest of her life to do it.

La belleza me sorprendió como una especie de dolorosa melancolía.

How can you really miss something when you never experienced it?

You can never hope to recapture the first fine careless rapture

I wi-li-lished I li-li-lived in Molahonkey la-la-land The la-la-land where I-li-li was bo-lo-lo-lo-lo-lo-lorn So I-li-li could play-la-lay my o-lo-lold banjo-lo-lo My o-lo-lold ban-jo-lo-lo won't go-lo-lo-lo-lo-lo-lo.

I just…want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more." I

Voltando le spalle al pilota e alla muta scatenata, mi misi a singhiozzare: le lacrime mi si gelavano sul viso, piangevo per la mia infanzia, per quel tempo in cui la neve era un piacere senza fine, in cui una città era uno spazio meraviglioso per vivere e una foresta non era ancora un posto comodo per uccidere la gente.

We all feel wistfulness or regret about roads not taken.

I'd like to have all of my losses back. But it's too late for that.

I wanted to be in an anti-gravity machine so bad! Maybe a different time, a different place.

O call back yesterday bid time return.

Peter sank. "I'd give anything to see time.

Elizabeth closed her eyes and wished herself back to that previous occasion when Robert had first kissed her and told her that he loved her. If only they could go back, wipe out the intervening years. If only she could change the way he was, make him become permanently what he had seemed to be then.

She felt a welling of love for him and a sinking of sadness. If only seven years could be erased.

Her feelings for him were purely regrets for a past that might have been. He was not now the sort of man whom she would wish to captivate even if that were possible.

E' uno strano dolore. Morire di nostalgia per qualcosa che non vivrai mai.