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Nostalgia Quotes

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Nostalgia Quotes

“A tingle shot up Chiara's spine as she grabbed one end of Agata's wand. Power coursed through her and out the wand, joining with the other fairies' magic. What was more, as she held Agata's wand, she could feel the fear and awesome wrath coming from Monstro. It was a taste of wild power, so intense and strong she felt she could do anything with it. Now she understood why Monstro was so valuable to the Heartless. His wrath was never-ending, and it took little effort for her to sense that his wells of strength were immense. Chiara pushed Monstro's power aside and focused on Agata's instructions. She was supposed to wield the wand while thinking of her fondest dreams. She thought about all the mornings she had spent with Ily, making music together, making messes in their parents' bakery kitchen, tossing pistachio cookies and chocolate cakes at each other. Was it her imagination, or did a stream of pale blue magic course out of Agata's wand?”

“Across our research, nostalgia emerged as a double-edged sword, a tool for both connection and disconnection. It can be an imaginary refuge from a world we don't understand and a dog whistle used to resist important growth in families, organizations, and the broader culture and to protect power, including white supremacy. What's spoken: I wish things were the way they used to be in the good ol' days. What's not spoken: When people knew their places. What's not spoken: When there was no accountability for the way my behaviors affect other people. What's not spoken: When we ignored other people's pain if it caused us discomfort. What's not spoken: When my authority was absolute and never challenged.”

“I could tell him I love him, but love seems too cliché, too overdone. I feel love, but I also feel jokes and front porch fights, pinky promises and friendship bracelets. I feel rolling my eyes when he made fun of my favorite songs, yelling at him when he paired up with Ashley Olson on our seventh-grade field day. I feel love, but I also feel our history, years and years of choosing him, the good and bad, highs and lows. Choosing to love. Not despite the flaws. Because of them. Because the mistakes prove we were together long enough to make them. Because we knew each other at our worst and even then, no one else compared.”

“Mr. Tridden told them how it had been twenty years ago, the band playing on that ornate stand at night, the men pumping air into their brass horns, the plump conductor flinging perspiration from his baton, the children and fireflies running in the deep grass, the ladies with long dresses and high pompadours treading the wooden xylophone walks with men in choking collars. There was the walk now, all softened into a fiber mush by the years. The lake was silent and blue and serene, and fish peacefully threaded the bright reeds, and the motorman murmured on and on, and the children felt it was some other year, with Mr. Tridden looking wonderfully young, his eyes lighted like small bulbs, blue and electric. It was a drifting, easy day, nobody rushing, and the forest all about, the sun held in one position, as Mr. Tridden's voice rose and fell, and a darning needle sewed along the air, stitching, restitching designs both holden and invisible. A bee settled into a flower, humming and humming.”

“Charlie and Douglas were the last to stand near the opened tongue of the trolley, the folding step, breathing electricity, watching Mr. Tridden's gloves on the brass controls.... "Well...so long again, Mir. Tridden." "Good-by, boys." "See you around, Mr. Tridden." "See you around." There was a soft sigh of the air; the door collapsed gently shut, tucking up its corrugated tongue. The trolley sailed slowly down the late afternoon, brighter than the sun, all tangerine, all flashing gold and lemon, turned a far corner, wheeling, and vanished, gone away.”

“It is difficult, when we look back on certain periods of our lives, not to succumb to romanticism and nostalgia. Even while I lived in London, though, I romanticised the city and the life I lived there; or rather, I knew it was a beautiful, romantic time of life, and that, like youth itself, the circumstances that had come so magically together would never be repeated, and that one day I would regret those years. Although I sometimes tantalise myself with the idea of moving to London again, I don't need Heraclitus to remind me that you can't step into the same city twice. The London where I lived no longer exists, any more than a dream exists upon awakening - a dream in which you were happy, in which life lived up to its promise.”

“One night at the Old Vicarage that winter, we listened to Ivor Novello's "Perchance to Dream" on the wireless. It was only a few years old then, and its small, haunting, fragile hit-song 'We'll Gather Lilacs' was still a tune that one heard constantly, on the wireless, from orchestras in restaurants, being whistled in the street. To this day I have only to hear the first notes, in some programme of 'Golden Oldies', to go straight back to that time. What an arid place this world would be without nostalgia.”

“Eighteen years have gone by, and still I can bring back every detail of that day in the meadow. Washed clean of summer's dust by days of gentle rain, the mountains wore a deep, brilliant green. The October breeze set white fronds of head-tall grass swaying. One long streak of cloud hung pasted across a dome of frozen blue. It almost hurt to look at that far-off sky. A puff of wind swept across the meadow and through her hair before it slipped into the woods to rustle branches and send back snatches of distant barking- a hazy sound that seemed to reach us from the doorway of another world. We heard no other sounds. We met no other people. We saw only two bright, red birds leap startled from the center of the meadow and dart into the woods. As we ambled along, Naoko spoke to me of wells.”

“Nostalgia is possibly the greatest of the lies that we all tell ourselves. It is the glossing of the past to fit the sensibilities of the present. For some, it brings a measure of comfort, a sense of self and of source, but others I fear take these altered memories too far, and because of that paralyze themselves to the realities about them. How many people wonder for that past, simpler and better world, I wonder? Without ever recognizing that truth that perhaps it was they who were simpler and better, and not the world about them.”

“It was like going back to a childhood home after decades away. You knew it intimately and saw past the changes time had wrought, the nostalgia seeping into you as forgotten memories sprang up, but it wasn’t quite right. It didn’t belong to you anymore, and you were left torn by the desire that things be as they once were, and the realization that the present was as it should be.”

“Ni mi madre, que durmió junto a él veinte años, supo del espanto que atenazó su vida y su imaginación desde entonces y para siempre. Todos creímos que se le había olvidado. Pero ahí estaba el abismo del que nunca hablaba, ahí, en la nostalgia con que se reclinó en la puerta de nuestra casa, a ver cómo sus tres hijos mayores nos íbamos a vivir a la ciudad de México.”

“Summertime! And summertime in my early twenties! And in love! No, better than that - secretly in love, coddling it up in myself. It's an odd feeling, coming rarely more than once in most of our lifetimes. In books, as often as not, they represent it as a sort of anguish but it wasn't so for me. Later perhaps, but not then.”

“To feel one’s attachment to a certain region, one’s love for a certain group of men, to know that there is always a spot where one’s heart will feel at peace – these are many certainties for a single human life. And yet this is not enough. But at certain moments everything yearns for that spiritual home. ‘Yes, we must go back there – there, indeed.”

“She loved the smell of old truck; thick cotton and vinyl seat covers, old gasoline and oil, the smell of country, decades of farmers, workers and families taking trips back and forth to town, up backroads to swimming holes, over fields, through all the weather. She imagined what this truck would have seen if it had eyes and a memory. She was about to become one more episode in its existence.”

“But this day he was lost in the story he made of their bodies. The men were in the midst of saving a six-inch Mickey Mouse trapped in a prison made of black VHS tapes. ...Before he could make out his mother's face, the backhand blasted the side of his head, followed by another, then more. A rain of it. A storm of mother. The boy's grandmother, hearing the screams, rushed in and, as if by instinct, knelt on all fours over the boy, make a small and feeble house with her frame. Inside it, the boy curled into his clothes and waited for his mother to calm. Through his grandmother's trembling arms, he noticed the videocassettes had toppled over. Mickey Mouse was free.”

“ياليت الزمان يعود، وسوالف الربح في غراش الكولا وغيرها. نتم نجرب ونشرب وما في فايدة. يالله يالله لو نربح غرشة مجانية! واللي حظه قوي بعد استهلاك صندووق كامل من الكولا يحصل فانية أو كرة عليها شعار الكولا، وهذا فعلاً كان يعتبر كنز بالنسبة لنا.”

“At a table, in a public library, on a winter Saturday, and yet I felt as if I'd arrived home. That house in North Bennington, another winter ten years earlier, and I as young as a girl could be and yet as old as any other Mother Earth, and I had learned what it was to love. How to be loved and how to provide love, and how to be of service as a gesture to the gods. Had I known how fast it would all go, how little it would amount to, would I have lived each day more consciously? Ah, me. I don't have the faintest idea.”

“The Swan passed on slowly to the hythe, and they turned their boats and followed it. There in the last end of Egladil upon the green grass the parting feast was held; but Frodo ate and drank little, heeding only the beauty of the Lady and her voice. She seemed no longer perilous or terrible, nor filled with hidden power. Already she seemed to him, as by men of later days Elves still at times are seen: present and yet remote, a living vision of that which has already been left far behind by the flowing streams of Time.”