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Nostalgia Quotes

Browse 1745 quotes about Nostalgia.

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Nostalgia Quotes

“Aegean Islands 1940-41 Where 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 mind More often than I imagine my grassy home; To sun one's bones beside the Explosive, 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, treading Of the peasant dancers; The dark bread The island wine and the sweet dishes; All these were elements in a happiness More distant now than any date like '40, A. D. or B. C., ever can express.”

PoetrySeaNostalgiaAegean
Author:Bernard Spencer
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“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.”

CollegeNostalgiaFloatingCollege LifeOberlin
Book:Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
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“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.”

NostalgiaRidingGlovesMotorcycles
Book:Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
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“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.”

NostalgiaImmigrantsDiaspora
Author:Salman Rushdie
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“There comes a time in your life, when you are left with too many yesterdays and very less tomorrows. When you can look back and relive all the golden moments of your life. You would laugh thinking about your graduation day, or the teacher who changed your life, or how you met your soulmate. But then, you look ahead and you would realize that there is no future – no tomorrow to look forward to, and nothing to plan. Then what would you do? How would you go on and live a future that doesn't exist?”

LifePastMemoriesRegretFutureNostalgiaResentment
Book:The Infinite Equinox
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“You scour these Chinatowns of the mind, translating them like sutras Xuan Zhang fetched from India, testing ways return might be possible against these homesick inventions, trace the traveller's alien steps across borders, and in between discover how transit has a way of lasting, the way these Chinatowns grew out of not knowing whether to return or to stay, and then became home.”

PoetryHistoryMemoryNostalgiaSingaporeDiasporaChinatown
Book:Clear Brightness
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“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.”

EmotionalNostalgiaEmotional Pain
Book:The Brothers Karamazov
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“There are so few people left alive from back then, you may as well be talking to them about the Black Death. Nobody recalls the shite in the 30s and that were fucking horrible. For Christ's sake, nobody wants to remember the shite in the 80s. It's all forgotten and swept under the rug by the newspapers and the BBC. They get nostalgic about the music, but they never want to mention the misery. It's all shite. As for the bloody Second World War, the politicians only talk about it when they need an excuse to go pissing about in one of those fucking Muslim countries.”

MemoryNostalgiaPoliticiansRememberingWw2Forgetting The Past
Book:Harry's Last Stand: How the world my generation built is falling down, and what we can do to save it
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“I have to tell you about these things from the past, because they are so important. The really important things usually lie in the distant past. And until you know about them, if you'll forgive my saying so, you will always to some extent a mere newcomer in my life. When I was at High School my favourite pastime was walking. Or rather, loitering. If we are talking about my adolescence, it's the more accurate word. Systematically, one by one, I explored all the districts of Pest. I relished the special atmosphere of every quarter and every street. Even now I can still find the same delight in houses that I did then. In this respect I've never grown up. Houses have so much to say to me. For me, they are what Nature used to be to the poets - or rather, what the poets thought of as Nature. But best of all I loved the Castle Hill District of Buda. I never tired of its ancient streets. Even in those days old things attracted me more than new ones. For me the deepest truth was found only in things suffused with the lives of many generations, which hold the past as permanently as mason Kelemen's wife buried in the high tower of Deva.”

PastIdentityArchitectureNostalgiaBudapest
Author:Antal Szerb
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“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.”

InspirationalTimeNostalgiaPresent Moment
Book:Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
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“The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it. This pronouncement seems to state the obvious and yet it is false. Men grow old, the end grows near, each moment becomes more and more valuable and there is no time to waste on recollection. It's important to understand the mathematical paradox in nostalgia, that it is most powerful in early youth , when the volume of life that has passed is quite small.”

YouthMemoryNostalgiaFollyParadox
Author:Milan Kundera
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“As it is there isn't a single thing isn't an opportunity for some 'alert' person, including practically everybody by the 'greed', that, they are 'alive', therefore. Etc. That, in fact, there are 'conditions'. Gravelly Hill or any sort of situation for improvement, when the Earth was properly regarded as a 'garden tenement messuage orchard and if this is nostalgia let you take a breath of April showers let's us reason how is the dampness in your nasal passage -- but I have had lunch in this 'pasture' (B. Ellery to George Girdler Smith 'gentleman' 1799, for £150) overlooking 'the town' sitting there like the Memphite lord of all Creation with my back -- with Dogtown over the Crown of gravelly hill It is not bad to be pissed off”

SpiritualityOpportunityAngerLuckMythNostalgiaConservationOpportunismSpirituality Of Imperfection
Book:Maximus Poems
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“It is said that when a person is experiencing death, and when shards of life begins to disintegrate from his mortal body, he starts getting a flashback of his entire life right in front of his eyes, like a reverie – a dream, or sometimes even a nightmare. When a person is dying, he can get a brief look of all the significant milestones of his life right in front of his eyes, as if time doesn’t exist and he is still right there, in that moment, where everything is possible; where he can get a piece of forever, while living in that uninvited flashback, and dying in his life, both at the same time.”

LifeDeathMemoriesRegretNostalgia
Book:The Infinite Equinox
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“Se puede ampliar el presente tanto como quiera, o lanzarse vertiginosamente hacia el futuro, o dar marcha atrás que es lo más peligroso porque ahí están los recuerdos, todos los recuerdos, los buenos, los regulares, los execrables. Ahí está el amor, o sea estás vos, y las grandes lealtades y también las grandes traiciones. Ahí está todo lo que uno pudo hacer y no hizo, y también lo que pudo no hacer y sí hizo. La encrucijada en la que el camino elegido fue el erróneo. Y ahí empieza la película, es decir cómo habría sido la historia si se hubiera tomado el otro rumbo, aquel que entonces se descartó.”

AmorNostalgiaTiempoNovelaPresenteBenedettiMariobenedetti
Author:Mario Benedetti
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“Stoner and Masters smiled at each other, and they spoke no more of the question that evening. But for years afterward, at odd moments, Stoner remembered what Masters had said; and though it brought him no vision of the University to which he had committed himself, it did reveal to him something about his relationship to the two men, and it gave him a glimpse of the corrosive and unspoiled bitterness of youth.”

YouthNostalgiaBitterness
Book:Stoner
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“However vivid they might be, past images and future delights did not protect Sylvia from the present, which "rules despotic over pale shadows of past and future". That was Sylvia's genius and her Panic Bird- her total lack of nostalgia. She had no armor. This left her especially vulnerable in New York, where she was removed from the context of her life, severed from that reassuring arc.”

DepressionAnxietyNostalgiaTunnel Vision
Book:Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953
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