Nostalgia Quotes

It should not be a surprise, even if it is not expected, if a shadow dances among the leaves, a face appears (or seems to), even a community of phantoms from the past. Here you will find answers, questions, and a host of stories.

Mary Lois Timbes

I slept that night in the room I used to have when I was a little boy, with the summer wind blowing in at the windows, bringing the smell of the ripe fields. I lay awake and watched the moonlight shining over the barn and the stacks and the pond, and the windmill making its old dark shadow against the blue sky.

Willa Cather

And she had been in love enough times to rule out the possibility that this was merely some feat of nostalgia.

Galt Niederhoffer

….For instance, I hated Pearl Jam at the time. I thought they were pompous blowhards. Now, whenever a Pearl Jam song comes on the car radio, I find myself pounding my fist on the dashboard, screaming, “Pearl JAM! Pearl JAM! Now this is rock and roll! Jeremy’s SPO-ken! But he’s still al-LIIIIIVE!

Rob Sheffield

The age of recording is necessarily an age of nostalgia--when was the past so hauntingly accessible?--but its bitterest insight is the incapacity of even the most perfectly captured sound to restore the moment of its first inscribing. That world is no longer there.

Geoffrey O'Brien

The staying awake was a great self-sacrificaing gesture of friendship, and wonderfully in keeping with our current mood of intense friendship and religious fervour. We were all in a state of shock. We engaged in a long Dostojevskyan conversations and drank one black coffee after another. It was sort of night typical of youth, the sort you only can look back on with shame and embarassment once you've grown up. But God knows, I must have grown up already by then, because I don't feel the slightest embarassment when I think back to it, just a terrible nostalgia.

Antal Szerb

how I wish I could fist a bit of old-fashioned beef in the fore-castle, as I used to when i was before the mast.

Herman Melville

And before me the empty table at the Theater Café with my reservation - Barnum Nilsen, 8PM - the only table no one sits at. And this too is an echo, an echo of time, the shadows of a discus spinning through blinding sunlight.

Lars Saabye Christensen

Strange, how the best moments of our lives we scarcely notice except in looking back.

Joe Abercrombie

I never felt so large and important as I did when being in love was everything. I saw you walking a foot above the earth and I remembered that was where I used to walk.

Scott Spencer

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

Vladimir Nabokov

Ludwik Szatera was a passionate lover of nostalgia. He could never come to terms with the eternal passage of men, objects and events. Each moment inexorably turning into the past was to him precious, invaluable, and he witnessed its passing with a sense of inexpressible regret.

Stefan Grabiński

She had forgotten his faults as we forgetthe sorrows of our departed childhood.

George Eliot

Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin. It is largely because of the books, films and reminiscences that have come between that the war of 1914-18 is now supposed to have had some tremendous, epic quality that the present one lacks.

George Orwell

It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia.

Ian McEwan

1980's: not a time period but a state of mind.

Carrie Vaughn

nostalgia, underlying cosmological explanation forWeak but detectable interaction between two neighboring universes that are otherwise not causally connected.Manifests itself in humans as a feeling of missing a place one has never been, a place very much like one’s home universe, or as a longing for versions of one’s self that one will never, and can never know.

Charles Yu

The days of my youth, as I look back on them; seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation can.

Vladimir Nabokov

As to the past, I would not mind retrieving from various corners of space-time certain lost comforts, such as baggy trousers and long, deep bathtubs.

Vladimir Nabokov

I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt so wrapped up in someone that I saw only him, caring not a jot what onlookers might think. I ached with nostalgia for a younger, more responsive me, who seemed to feel things more intensely.

Catherine Sanderson

I see the old even as I am looking at the new--the storefronts now occupied by up-to-date boutiques and trendy retail shops. It's almost like being in two places at the same time.

Mary Lois Timbes

Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy.

Evelyn Waugh

Which one of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?

Jorge Luis Borges

I hate being so nostalgic about the Sixties.

David Bailey

It's just odd being a guest at the wedding. When you dreamed about it for so long, even if you we're a different person, and it was years ago. Sounds so stupid. I was stupid.

Harriet Evans

Dachux: It’s not like in the old days where you could kill a hogre or two, and nobody asked questions.

C.D. Sutherland

Apocalyptic saucer cults have started to spring up all over America. One small group, which has been receiving messages from outer space via Lake City housewife Mrs. Marian Keech, becomes the subject of a research team led by psychologist Leon Festinger. According to an alien entity named Sananda, the end of the world is due any day and under the most cataclysmic of circumstances. The group meets regularly to discuss the latest predictions from Sananda and the rest of the Space Brothers, all relayed to them by Mrs. Keech. Some members bake cakes in the shape of flying saucers to be consumed during their gatherings while local college football scores are closely debated.

Ken Hollings

Rocket Fever Grips Nation's Teenagers' cheers on enthusiastic newsreel, reflecting the nation's sudden reversal in attitude following the successful launch of Explorer-I into Earth orbit. Rather than being strange and threatening, outer space looks set to become the next big distraction after Elvis Presley and Davy Crockett hats. 'More and more teenagers are passing up rock and roll for a rocket role,' commentator Michael Fitzmaurice blithely remarks before very probably wishing he hadn't.

Ken Hollings

Whether the Eisenhower administration has underestimated the American people's interest in space exploration or Truman never full appreciated MacArthur, the Soviet Union's Sputnik program has created a public spectacle that even Disney and von Braun might envy.

Ken Hollings

The existence of flying saucers is unlikely to be verified by an accumulation of facts and figures, dates and times, which, if anything, tend to dull and distract the creative intelligence, obscuring more than they reveal.

Ken Hollings

The public's abiding fascination with flaying saucers, C.G. Jung suggests, 'may be a spontaneous reaction of the subconscious to fear of the apparently insoluble political situation in the world that may lead at any moment to catastrophe. At such times eyes turn heavenwards in search of help, and miraculous forebodings of a threatening or consoling nature appear from on high.

Ken Hollings

Reported sightings of UFOs are tailing off. With public interest declining and subscriptions dwindling, NICAP and APRO start to compete with each other over membership. The open-minded middle ground is stretched to breaking point, caught between the hardware of scientific detail and the extreme fantasies of contact.

Ken Hollings

If parents start to fear that monsters may have been let loose in their children's bedrooms, it may be because their children are the monsters. Consider what kind of world they are growing up in. It can all end tomorrow. Material progress no longer seems as closely meshed with human evolution as it once was; the anticipated leap into the future may not take place in a time or manner that can be so easily predicted. However, by now everyone from Richard Nixon to Chairman Mao knows that the only way to force the evolutionary curve to bend your way is by throwing larger numbers at it.

Ken Hollings

We will never understand our world until we have come to terms with its future: it is the age in which we live. The Cold War depended upon internal division in order to maintain itself. Behind its various feints, games and strategies lay a perception of behavior as a form of enforced conformity. People would only do what they were prompted to do. This was the thinking that held the lonely crowd together, briefly connecting the forward thrust of material progress with the broader evolutionary curve.

Ken Hollings

These were the kids who would take LSD for recreational purposes, who relied upon tape recorders to supply the weird studio effects their music required and who could repeat the cosmic wisdom of the Space Brothers as if it were the Pledge of Allegiance. Brought up on space heroes and super beings, as revealed to them in comic books and TV shows, the whole galaxy was their birthright, just as Mad magazine and cheap B-movies had shown them hows stupid and flimsy a construct daily life could be. To the subtle dismay of their parents, this was a generation capable of thinking the unthinkable as a matter of course. That their grand cosmological adventure should come to an end just as Neil Armstrong succeeded in bringing Suburbia to the Moon is another story and it will have to wait for another time.

Ken Hollings

She, who had never liked weddings, had allowed herself this fantasy. Her wedding day to Rory. A pretty church in Sussex, festooned with spring flowers. Rows of relatives, and her, Elle, floating down the aisle in cream silk to 'The arrival of queen Sheba', with eyes only for him... Rory, slightly rumpled, slightly scared, her love, her only one.But that wasn't how it had turned out. She knew she was OK, watching him, in fact she was happy for him, happy for Libby. But she couldn't help but feel a pang of sympathy for the girl she'd been, who'd loved him so much. She was still dreaming somewhere, hoping this day would come.

Harriet Evans

The rival ideologies of the left and right are both pining for the 50s. The only difference is that liberals want to work there, while conservatives want to go home there.

Brink Lindsey

That night I looked up at those same stars, but I didn't want any of those things. I didn't want Egypt, or France, or far-flung destinations. I just wanted to go back to my life from my childhood, just to visit it, and touch it, and to convince myself that yes, it had been real.

Jenny Lawson

I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.

Lois McMaster Bujold

We do not disappear without a trace. We leave a wake that never quite disappears, a gash in time that we so laboriously leave behind us.

Lars Saabye Christensen

Despite your best efforts and intentions, there's a limited reservoir to fellowship before you begin to rely solely on the vapors of nostalgia. Eventually, you move on, latch on to another group of friends. Once in a while, though, you remember something, a remark or a gesture, and it takes you back. You think how close all of you were, the laughs and commiserations, the fondness and affection and support. You recall the parties, the trips, the dinners and late, late nights. Even the arguments and small betrayals have a revisionist charm in retrospect. You're astonished and enlivened by the memories. You wonder why and how it ever stopped. You have the urge to pick up the phone, fire off an email, suggesting reunion, resumption, and you start to act, but then don't, because it would be awkward talking after such a long lag, and, really, what would be the point? Your lives are different now. Whatever was there before is gone. And it saddens you, it makes you feel old and vanquished--not only over this group that disbanded, but also over all the others before and after it, the friends you had in grade and high school, in college, in your twenties and thirties, your kinship to them (never mind to all your old lovers) ephemeral and, quite possibly, illusory to begin with.

Don Lee

I miss that world from the safe distance of memory.

Maureen Corrigan

I was born in the age of "alas".

Pat Conroy

There is no cause for nostalgia save the good and life-enhancing nostalgia for the present.

Ray Bradbury

That was the danger of nostalgia, Drizzt realized. One often remembered the good of the past while forgetting the troubles.

R.A. Salvatore

Every cure for nostalgia is obsolete.

Raheel Farooq

Nostalgia is best cured via horse whipping.

stephanie roberts

A list of things you might not hear: eylash opening on the pillow, the appearance of a star, a leaf leaving a tree, a hand in your hair, a lie being withheld, a tear's journey from eye to shoe, air becoming blue, longing.

Martine Murray

Peter is suffering from an attack of nostalgia, she knows the symptoms. She mustn't join in otherwise she'll be swept away too, drowning in a quicksand of the past.

Elly Griffiths

Nostalgia for the 20th century brain helps nobody.

Douglas Coupland

The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story - of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It's like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It's like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you - and it can't, and it shouldn't, because something IS missing. That isn't of its nature negative. The missing part, the missing past, can be an opening, not a void. It can be an entry as well as an exit. It is the fossil record, the imprint of another life, and although you can never have that life, your fingers trace the space where it might have been, and your fingers learn a kind of Braille.

Jeanette Winterson

Smells could bring a person back clearer than pictures even could.

Anne Tyler

Because nobody knows you better than somebody who knew you way back then.

Claire Cook

It is not settled happiness but momentary joy that glorifies the past.

C.S. Lewis

Preparing to go to school was like getting ready for extended deep sea diving.

Jean Shepherd

So before we end and then beginWe'll drink a toast to how it's beenA few more hours to be completeA few more nights on satin sheetsA few more times that I can sayI've loved these days

Billy Joel

She sighed, she snored, not that she was asleep, only drowsy and heavy, drowsy and heavy, like a field of clover in the sunshine this hot July day, with the bees going round and about and the yellow butterflies.

Virginia Woolf

Michael [Hutchence] is hands down one of the greatest frontmen in music. The style, the voice—all of it. Any way that I was ever influenced by him really comes down to small, pale imitations compared to the real thing. There is a fearlessness about him. Watching him at Wembley Stadium with 70,000 people, he looks as comfortable as if he were in his own living room.

Lori Majewski

Some say that time is like water that flows around us (like a stone in the river) and some say we flow with time (like a twig floating on the surface of the water).

Chuck Klosterman

Long gone was the cheery welcome of the seaside hotelier, replaced by a weary nostalgia for the good old days.

Alan Gibbons

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Nostalgia Quotes

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