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Past Quotes

“The school was nothing but reminiscence - of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia about somebody else's past.”

DifferentSchoolPastFantasyLandSourceColdEuropeTownsNostalgiaHillsClassicItalianSiteExileAcademyAbbey
Book:A Boy's Own Story: Picador Classic
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“We have the bad habit, some of us, of looking back to a time - almost any time will do - when society was stable and orderly, family ties stronger and deeper, love more lasting and faithful, and so on. Let me be your Cassandra prophesying after the fact, and a long study of the documents in the case: it was never true, that is, no truer than it is now.”

LongFactsPastFamilyCasesStudyHabitLet MeStrongerDeeperNostalgiaFaithfulTiesLastingStableLooking BackDocumentsBad HabitsOrderlyFamily TiesDeeper Love
Book:Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings
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“When the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at is son and sees himself in the face of the boy. He imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father. Inexplicably, he is moved by this. It is not just the sight of the boy that moves him, not even the thought of standing inside his father, but what he sees in the boy of his own vanished past. It is a nostalgia for his own life that he feels, perhaps, a memory of his own boyhood as a son to his father.”

FeelsWritingLooksPastFacesMovingDiesFatherMemoriesBoysImagineSonBecomingStandingSightMovedNostalgiaBoyhood
Book:The Invention of Solitude
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“Ressentiment is always to some degree a determinant of the romantic type of mind. At least this is so when the romantic nostalgia for some past era (Hellas, the Middle Ages, etc.) is not primarily based on the values of that period, but on the wish to escape from the present. Then all praise of the “past” has the implied purpose of downgrading present-day reality.”

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Book:On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing: Selected Writings
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“To anybody who can hold the Present at its worth without being inappreciative of the Past, it may be forgiven, if to such an one the solitary old hulk at Portsmouth, Nelson's Victory, seems to float there, not alone as the decaying monument of a fame incorruptible, but also as a poetic approach, softened by its picturesqueness, to the Monitors and yet mightier hulls of the European ironclads.”

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Book:Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories
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