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Nostalgia Quotes

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Nostalgia Quotes

“One passes imperceptibly from one scene, one age, one life to another. Suddenly, walking down the street, be it real or be it a dream, one realizes for the first time that the years have flown, that all this has passed forever and will live on only in memory; and then the memory turns inward with a strange, clutching brilliance and one goes over these scenes and incidents perpetually, in dream and reverie, while walking a street, while lying with a woman, while reading a book, while talking to a stranger . . . suddenly, but always with terrific insistence and always with terrific accuracy, these memories intrude, rise up like ghosts and permeate every fiber of one's being. Hencefoward everything moves on shifting levels—our thoughts, our dreams, our actions, our whole life. A parallelogram in which we drom from one platform of our scaffold to another. Henceforward we walk split into myriad fragments, like an insect witha hundred feet, a centipede with soft-stirring feet that drinks in the atmosphere; we walk with sensitive filaments that drink avidly of past and future, and all things melt into music and sorrow; we walk against a united world, asserting our dividedness. All things, as we walk, splitting with us into a myriad iridiscent fragments. The great fragmentation of maturity. The great change. In youth we were whole and the terror and pain of the world penetrated us through and through. There was no sharp separation between joy and sorrow: the fused into one, as our waking life fuses with dream and sleep. We rose one being in the morning and at night we went down into an ocean, drowned out completely, clutching the stars and the fever of the day.”

“That goddamn restaurant had claimed her from the day she was born and now she understood that she would never outrun it. /June rested against the hood of the car, crossed her arms, and continued smoking, taking stock of the new shape of her life. She was overworked and overtired and lonely. She missed the parents who had never truly understood her, missed the man who had never truly loved her, missed the future she thought she had been building for herself, missed the young girl she used to be.”

“So this nostalgia is, what, an echo of a happiness? Or a long-delayed one? Is it an outline of one, from trying to remember a happiness I knew I should have felt in the moment but that most likely wasn't really there? Or, maybe nostalgia is to feel happiness about something that is over because it is over. That in order to feel happy about it, it must be something that you can't go back to and affect, that you can't mess up from where you are now, but also, that you can't really feel at all.”

“¿Cómo le explica el abuelo al nieto lo que era el Tango, el salir a encararse una mina y bailar con ella en un local porteño, mientras sonaba la orquesta de fondo? ¿Cómo le dice el padre al hijo lo que era la sensación de sacar un vinilo de la funda, y hacerlo sonar por primera vez? ¿Cómo le hace entender el hermano mayor al menor, lo que sentíamos al abrir y oler la caja de ese CD nuevo? No lo sé, realmente no lo sé. No sé cómo explicarle a alguien que las tres sensaciones recién descritas, nada tiene que ver con lo que se siente al reproducir o descargar un archivo de audio. Tampoco sé cómo explicarle a ellos.”

“For dinner they ate the stewed pumpkin with their bread. They made it into pretty shapes on their plates. It was a beautiful color, and smoothed and molded so prettily with their knives. Ma never allowed them to play with their food at table; they must always eat nicely everything that was set before them, leaving nothing on their plates. But she did let them make the rich, brown, stewed pumpkin into pretty shapes before they ate it.”

“Elodie was a nostalgic person, but she hated the charge. The word was terribly maligned. People used it as a stand-in for sentimentality, when it wasn’t that at all. Sentimentality was mawkish and cloying, where nostalgia was acute and aching. It described yearning of the most profound kind: an awareness that time’s passage could not be stopped and there was no going back to reclaim a moment or a person or do things differently.”

“Nostalgia is an illness, but it belongs to the person through whom time is filtered, unpredictably and individually, with all the flaws and defects inherent in human beings. The era that had passed is located in pockets of consciousness, some hidden and unseen, like ponds in remote forests, some bright and familiar like houses on the forest edge, but all of them fragile and changeable, and they die when consciousness dies.”

“If we moved to Bonk we could get a big apartment for the cost of this place—' 'This is our home, Irina,' said the oldest sister. 'Ah, a home of lost illusions and thwarted hopes...' 'We could go out dancing and everything.' 'I remember when we lived in Bonk,' said the middle sister dreamily. 'Things vere better then.' 'Things vere alvays better then,' said the oldest sister. The youngest sister sighed and looked out of the window. She gasped. 'There's a man running through the cherry orchard!' 'A man? Vot could he possibly vant?' The youngest sister strained to see. 'It looks like he wants... a pair of trousers...' 'Ah,' said the middle sister dreamily. 'Trousers ver better then.”