Nostalgia Quotes - Page 2

Anthony imagined a time before all that - a time when people sipped Earl Grey tea on a breeze cooled veranda and looked out upon endless countryside.

Alan Gibbons

Woman lost (skin deep) like a damn fine thread in the fireWoman of the world caught up in your black machinationsI was a woman who cried alone at night, who gave it all away when she saw the good heart of the man insideWoman caught standing up; her open parts are broken -

Abigail George

He smelled the odor of the pine boughs under him, the piney smell of the crushed needles and the sharper odor of the resinous sap from the cut limbs. ... This is the smell I love. This and fresh-cut clover, the crushed sage as you ride after cattle, wood-smoke and the burning leaves of autumn. That must be the odor of nostalgia, the smell of the smoke from the piles of raked leaves burning in the streets in the fall in Missoula. Which would you rather smell? Sweet grass the Indians used in their baskets? Smoked leather? The odor of the ground in the spring after rain? The smell of the sea as you walk through the gorse on a headland in Galicia? Or the wind from the land as you come in toward Cuba in the dark? That was the odor of cactus flowers, mimosa and the sea-grape shrubs. Or would you rather smell frying bacon in the morning when you are hungry? Or coffee in the morning? Or a Jonathan apple as you bit into it? Or a cider mill in the grinding, or bread fresh from the oven?

Ernest Hemingway

Pretty mountains, pretty river, bumpy but pleasant tar road... old buildings, old people on a front porch... strange how old, obsolete buildings and plants and mills, the technology of fifty and a hundred years ago, always seem to look so much better than the new stuff.

Robert M. Pirsig

This song always kills me, I said. She sighed, and then gave up. Why? Oh, I don't know. It makes me feel nostalgia for a time I never even knew. I wasn't even alive. That's what I do to you too, she said, I'll just bet. I was what everything I loved did to me.

Michael Chabon

The memory of the past did not redeem the future, as he insisted on believing.

Gabriel García Márquez

I go back to Oberlin in the dead of winter to give a "convocation speech" in Finney Chapel, the largest and most historic of campus structures. In a subconscious nod to my college experience I forget to pack both tights and underwear and have to spend the weekend going commando in a wool skirt and knee socks. I am toured around the school like a stranger by a girl who didn't even go here. We stop at a glossy new cafe for tea and scones. She asks if I want a tour of the dormitories- no, I just want to wander around alone and maybe cry.

Lena Dunham

Aegean Islands 1940-41Where white stares, smokes or breaks,Thread white, white of plaster and of foam,Where sea like a wall falls;Ribbed, lionish coast,The stony islands which blow into my mindMore often than I imagine my grassy home;To sun one's bones beside theExplosive, crushed-blue, nostril-opening sea(The weaving sea, splintered with sails and foam,Familiar of famous and deserted harbours,Of coins with dolphins on and fallen pillars.)To know the gear and skill of sailing,The drenching race for home and the sail-white houses,Stories of Turks and smoky ikons,Cry of the bagpipe, treadingOf the peasant dancers;The dark breadThe island wine and the sweet dishes;All these were elements in a happinessMore distant now than any date like '40,A. D. or B. C., ever can express.

Bernard Spencer

When the north wind blew across the tar ponds, voices were carried away.

Jonathan Campbell

I talked yesterday about caring, I care about these moldy old riding gloves. I smile at them flying through the breeze beside me because they have been there for so many years and are so old and so tired and so rotten there is something kind of humorous about them. They have become filled with oil and sweat and dirt and spattered bugs and now when I set them down flat on a table, even when they are not cold, they won't stay flat. They've got a memory of their own. They cost only three dollars and have been restitched so many times it is getting impossible to repair them, yet I take a lot of time and pains to do it anyway because I can't imagine any new pair taking their place. That is impractical, but practicality isn't the whole thing with gloves or with anything else.

Robert M. Pirsig

...as if in rebellion, certain emotions become amplified at the exact moments when you are expected not to feel them at all.

Chinelo Okparanta

The glories of the past compensated for the imperfections of the present.

Margaret MacMillan

What are days for?Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over.They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days?Ah, solving that questionBrings the priest and the doctor In their long coatsRunning over the fields.

Philip Larkin

Evangelicals have squandered their cultural capital because they have tried to reclaim a standing in American culture that they never had. The American Founding was a mix of fragmented religious (and not-so-religious) voices.

Joseph LaConte

It may be that writers in my position,exiles, or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutilated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must do in the knowledge - which gives rise to profound uncertainties- that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost, that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.

Salman Rushdie

Fyodor Pavlovitch was drunk when he heard of his wife's death, and the story is that he ran out into the street and began shouting with joy, raising his hands to Heaven: "Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace," but others say he wept without restraint like a little child, so much so that people were sorry for him, in spite of the repulsion he inspired. It is quite possible that both versions were true, that he rejoiced at his release, and at the same time wept for her who released him.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

He stood with his two frail hands on his cane and his eyes closed, and breathed in deeply the scent of the past. "Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.

Arthur Golden

I've always had a talent for recognizing when I am in a moment worth being nostalgic for. When I was little, my mother would come home from a party, her hair cool from the wind, her perfume almost gone, and her lips a faded red, and she would coo at me "You're still awake! Hiiii." And I'd think how beautiful she was and how I always wanted to remember her stepping out of the elevator in her pea-green wool coat, thirty-nine years old, just like that.

Lena Dunham

Sometimes the best vacation is simply closing your eyes for several minutes and recalling wonderful memories.

Jett

Nostalgia was never what it used to be.

Brian Spellman

Puberty flicked a switch inside of them and dreams were replaced by hormones and college prep courses and varsity sports while I continued to look for faeries in the woods behind my house.

Brian James

It was a place where, if troubles did not vanish, they were made bearable.

Harper Lee

Everyone likes to reminisce, but not one wants to listen, and everyone feels annoyed when someone else tells a story.

Liu Cixin

Speed is simply the rite that initiates us intoemptiness: a nostalgic desire for forms to revert to immobility, concealed beneath the very intensification of their mobility. Akin to the nostalgia for living forms that haunts geometry.

Jean Baudrillard

We’d all agreed that we’d outgrown jumping rope, but Shady had given me such a nice gift of a skipping rope, and when there’s nothing better to do, I guess you go back to what once felt good.

Clare Vanderpool

Mixed with the love we hold for our native country is the fact that it is the place where we were raised, and, should anything have gone a little wrong in this process, we will be reminded of this fault, by the scene of the crime, until the day we die.

John Cheever

The old London was fading from her memory. She no longer expected to see the shops that had been bombed when she passed familiar streets. In many places the sites were being redeveloped. That’s what seemed real now – the new buildings and the flats above them. As she hit her stride, Mirabelle smiled. It felt good to be in the big city again and on her way.

Sara Sheridan

Isn't there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves?

Ford Madox Ford

I had intended to visit the haunting ground of my school days. Subconsciously I wanted to be in a place where anxiety, responsibility and financial burden had yet to surface.

Joe Cawley

I would even argue that, for many displaced people, nostalgia is also blended with fear - the fear of uncertainty and of facing the challenges posed by the larger world and the fear of the absence of the clarity and confidence provided by the past. In essence, nostalgia is associated mostly with the experience of a particular type of migrants, namely, exiles.

Ha Jin

For youth, the moon is a promise of all those tremendous things which await it, for older people a memento that the promise was never kept, a reminder of all that broke and went to pieces...And what is moonshine? Secondhand sunshine. Diluted, counterfeit.

Hjalmar Söderberg

Divided - No tides of time or distance will wash away your step. It does not fleet as they do, those gladiators and their mighty spears or the beasts that howl into the dark for release. Our story carves deeper, pitilessly, infinitely. A wound that bleeds the ink that stained your palm and the tears of an impossible tomorrow.

RJ Arkhipov

The head which does not turn backwards towards horizons that have vanished contains neither thought nor love.

Victor Hugo

I didn't really want to come back here and again have to feel like my lungs were drowning in this perverse nostalgia.

John Green

For a long moment we didn't move. We just stared at each other. So much time had passed since our eyes last met. So much had changed. I turned away and pressed my head to the cold window pane. I traced my initials onto the misted glass and, as they began to fade, He reached out his fingers and retraced my signature. I watched it fade once more and felt his moist fingers brush against my lips. He let them linger there a moment, then replaced them with his own lips. Then I woke up.

RJ Arkhipov

Washingtonians love the "So-and-so is spinning in his grave" cliché. Someone is always speculating about how some great dead American would be scandalized over some crime against How It Used to Be. The Founding Fathers are always spinning in their graves over something, as is Ronald Reagan, or FDR. Edward R. Murrow is a perennial grave spinner in the news business (though in fact, Murrow was cremated).

Mark Leibovich

The whiff of ocean on the southern breeze and the smell of burning asphalt brought back memories of summers past. It had seemed as though those sweet dreams of summer would last forever: the warmth of a girl’s skin, an old rock ‘n’ roll song, freshly washed button-down shirt, the odor of cigarette smoke in a pool changing room, a fleeting premonition. Then one summer (when had it been?) the dreams had vanished, never to return.

Haruki Murakami

What Will Linger/Hollow of Him - They crept so quietly back. Mere hints of words, at first, then whispers in the loud echoing a winter past. In this place, hollow of Him, his poetry resounded. I could almost taste the fragments of the worlds he had discovered. I remember the ache in his words; you could see each syllable smoulder in his gaze.

RJ Arkhipov

It is always the same. Whether you are walking or going by train, the way always seems shorter the second time than the first. (And that is true of distances that are not to be measured in miles and yards.)

Erich Kästner

Wendy’s house, unlike many in Cape Breton, had three floors, along with a basement and attic. Aside from Wendy’s bedroom, there was a laundry room. The dirty water in the sink would rush from the washer hose, bubbling up, threatening to overflow, but it never did. Next-door was a motel with a neon sign that read in turquoise and pink, “We have the best rates in town!”, but the ‘E’ in ‘rates’ kept flickering on and off day and night so that every few seconds it would switch to, “We have the best rats in town!

Rebecca McNutt

So are we going to eat some Boo Berry or what?" John said, leaping out of his seat and toward the refrigerator.

Eric Spitznagel

Graceful. Lean. Coordinated as she whirls, though how she knows what dancing is, [her grandfather] could never guess.The song plays on. He lets it go too long. The antenna is still up, probably dimly visible against the sky, the whole attic might as well shine like a beacon. But in the candlelight, in the sweet rush of a concerto, Marie-Laure bites her lower lip, and her face gives off a secondary glow, reminding him of the marshes beyond the town walls, in those winter dusks when the sun has set but isn't fully swallowed, and big patches of red pools of light burn - places he used to go with his brother, in what seems like lifetimes ago.

Anthony Doerr

He pressed the herb to his nose. Thyme. He loved the name and he loved the smell. He looked out the window at the illusion of deep woods. His face too was out there, hung on a tree and returning his gaze. He drew close to the glass to lose the mirror effect. Outside, the forest panted its beefy halitus; the soil held the breaths of gloom in its dampness. Fifteen thousand years ago a glacier had sliced through this park he was living in, bringing with it the nutrients from all its travels. Fifteen thousand years ago human beings were the fable that frightened the dark woods.

Nancy Zafris

When shall I cease to regret you! – When learn to feel a home elsewhere! – Oh! Happy house, could you know what I suffer in now viewing you from this spot, from whence perhaps I may view you no more! – And you, ye well-known trees! – but you will continue the same. – No leaf will decay because we are removed, nor any branch become motionless although we can observe you no longer! – No; you will continue the same; unconscious of the pleasure or the regret you occasion, and insensible of any change in those who walk under your shade! – But who will remain to enjoy you?

Jane Austen

All you will have is the present. Waste no energy crying over yesterday or dreaming of tomorrow. Nostalgia is fatiguing and destructive, it is the vice of the expatriate. You must put down roots as if they were forever, you must have a sense of permanence.

Isabel Allende

The problem with nostalgia is what we tend to do is only remember what you like and you forget the parts you didn't like,

John Edwards

These rotary dials were like meditation, they forced you to slow down and concentrate. If you polled the next number too soon, you had to start over from the top.

Rainbow Rowell

an old villa surrounded by a garden looked to them like the image of a comforting home, the dream of an idyll long past.

Milan Kundera

I roam the streets, silent and still,I look for You, in each and everything.I have come a long way from myself,so away,so long, that I,myself have become a memory.And so i seek Your gaze, to See myself,But what am i ? without Your touch ?How distant You are, yet How close Iam,this place holds a fortune, for my lost self.

Syed Murtaza Haroon

Until then her view of time was the present moving forward and devouring the future; she either feared its swiftness (when she was awaiting something difficult) or rebelled at its slowness (when she was awaiting something fine). Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past. She sees a young man disconnecting himself from her life and going away, forevermore out of her reach. Mesmerized, all she can do is watch this piece of her life move off; all she can do is watch it and suffer. She is experiencing a brand-new feeling called nostalgia.

Milan Kundera

It was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France.

Milan Kundera

Something—he wondered later if it was simply his youth—something that had weighed upon him until that moment broke off him, the way a piece of rock slides slowly into the sea and disappears in a spray of foam.

Patrick Modiano

Most of the days, I am gripped by these visions,Memories! that haunt my present,What is it, That Separates me from You ?What is it, That can bring me close ?All through the night, i seek such things,All through the night, i lose Myself .

Syed Murtaza Haroon

I understand, Bill. Because I tell myself a lot of stories to help me sleep at night. Stories about how Babe was my dearest friend, and I never betrayed her. Stories about how you and I had a great love, not just an occasional roll in the hay whenever she was out of town. Stories about how wonderful life was back then, when none of us told each other the truth, but so what? It was all so beautiful, wasn’t it? It was all so lovely and gracious. Not like it is now.

Melanie Benjamin

And so it is inevitable that the day has come when we write about privacy with such nostalgia, analysing it as we would some unearthed fossil of a creature our human eyes had never fallen on.

Aysha Taryam

His persistent nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldn't stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in florescents, were gone. Everyone had been so much more entertaining then. What had happened?

Hanya Yanagihara

Nostalgia-- that's the basic sickness, and I never heard of a doctor who can cure it.

Tim O'Brien

I began a lifelong affair with nostalgia, with only the vaguest notions of what I was nostalgic for.

Lucy Grealy

The Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, the walls surrounding a medieval castle: obsolete walls evoke nostalgia. Make your walls obsolete.

Khang Kijarro Nguyen

I have never forgotten, and I can't imagine you have, and I've thought of it over the years. It was so good, when it was good, I kept thinking. How could it go wrong?

George R.R. Martin

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Nostalgia Quotes - Page 2

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