Nostalgia Quotes

Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Sometimes loneliness makes the loudest noise.

~ Aaron Ben-Ze'ev

how sad and bad and mad it was - but then, how it was sweet

~ Robert Browning

Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.

~ Orhan Pamuk

Ten long trips around the sun since I last saw that smile, but only joy and thankfulness that on a tiny world in the vastness, for a couple of moments in the immensity of time, we were one.

~ Ann Druyan

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.

~ Rob Sheffield

There is something incredibly nostalgic and significant about the annual cascade of autumn leaves.

~ Joe L. Wheeler

when we were kidslaying around the lawnon ourbellieswe often talkedabouthowwe'd like todieandwe allagreed on thesamething,we'd alllike to diefucking(althoughnone of ushaddone anyfucking)and nowthatwe are hardlykidsany longerwe think moreabouthownot todieandalthoughwe'rereadymost ofuswouldprefer todo italoneunder thesheetsnowthatmost ofushave fuckedour livesaway.

~ Charles Bukowski

But in that moment I understood what they say about nostalgia, that no matter if you're thinking of something good or bad, it always leaves you a little emptier afterward.

~ John Corey Whaley

Philosophy is really nostalgia, the desire to be at home.

~ Novalis

Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?

~ Julian Barnes

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

What seems real one moment is fiction the nextand gone out of existence the moment after that.Nostalgia is the greatest enemy of truth,and change our only constancy.

~ David Budbill

The nostalgia of a moment's love can be an illusionary precipice from which we fall from truth; in heartbreak, what we escape to in the past is what tortures us in the present.

~ Mike Norton

The thing about memories wasn't that many of them inevitably faded, but that repeated recall of the ones you remembered burnished them into shining, gorgeous lies

~ Dexter Palmer

Between the MileI have always counted the miles.Sometimes they came quick,Other times slow.The distance between things,The way I could know.Close could feel far,And far could feel near.The miles that passed too quickly,The ones I ran out of fear.They weren’t all the same,So I had been told,The unmarked trails,And the days I was bold.Some miles went down,Spiraling so low,When I was afraid to look forward,There was nowhere to go.The sunset came fast,And the day turned to night,But the trails could be endless,If I looked at them right.Everything I knew,All I was told,The conversations left behind,The people who grew old.When the miles stretched out before me,I wanted to sew them at the seam,Looking forward and then back,Holding everything in between.

~ Jacqueline Simon Gunn

There are a few moments in your life when you are truly and completely happy, and you remember to give thanks. Even as it happens you are nostalgic for the moment, you are tucking it away in your scrapbook.

~ David Benioff

If you are a dreamer, come in,If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer...If you're a pretender, come sit by my fireFor we have some flax-golden tales to spin. Come in!Come in!

~ Shel Silverstein

Nos-tal-gic,’ Akira said, as though it were a word he had been struggling to find. Then he said a word in Japanese, perhaps the Japanese for ‘nostalgic.’ ‘Nos-tal-gic. It is good to be nos-tal-gic. Very important.’‘Really, old fellow?’‘Important. Very important. Nostalgic. When we nostalgic, we remember. A world better than this world we discover when we grow. We remember and wish good world come back again. So very important. Just now, I had dream. I was boy. Mother, Father, close to me. in our house.’He fell silent and continued to gaze across the rubble.‘Akira,’ I said, sensing that the longer this talk went on, the greater was some danger I did not wish fully to articulate. ‘We should move on. We have much to do.

~ Kazuo Ishiguro

I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people.

~ Willa Cather

That was happiness. Not the framed greatest hits, but the moments in between. At the time, I hadn't pegged them as being particularly happy. But now, looking back at those phantom snapshots, I'm struck by my calm, my ease, the evident comfort with my life. I'm happy in retrospect.

~ Maria Semple

There are many forms of love as there is moments in time, and you are capable of feeling them all at different stages of your life.

~ Shannon L. Alder

I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.

~ Bill Bryson

s father's words. But they are as empty on his lips as they feel in my ears. This was has taken everything from him. I see in his eyes how broken he is. how terribly hard he is trying to be his father's son. If he could, he would choose to be back by the campfire we made in the highlands of the Institute. He would return to the days of glory when life was simple, when friends seemed true. But wishing for the past doesn't clean the blood from either of our hands.

~ Pierce Brown

You can miss places. You can miss people.Just know that what you’re really missing is the way things were. And even if you could go there again…. see them again…. you can’t go back.They’re not the same.You’re not the same.The loss of them changed you.

~ Ranata Suzuki

The aching in my chest isn't because I miss you,it's realizing that you have become someone I no longer know,your fears, your 4 am thoughts, your achievements,are things I no longer have an equivalent to.Who we were and who we are are four different people, and the me from now doesn't relate to the me from then, let alone to the you from now.-Tanzy Sayadi and Jarod Kintz

~ Tanzy Sayadi

For it is up to you and meto take solacein nostalgia's armsand our abilityto create the everlastingfrom fleeting moments.

~ Sanober Khan

The campus, an academy of trees,under which some hand, the wind's I guess,had scattered the pale lightof thousands of spring beauties,petals stained with pink veins;secret, blooming for themselves.We sat among them.Your long fingers, thin body,and long bones of improbable genius;some scattered gene as Kafka must have had.Your deep voice, this passing dust of miracles.That simple that was myself, half conscious,as though each moment was a pagewhere words appeared; the bent hammer of the typestruck against the moving ribbon.The light air, the restless leaves;the ripple of time warped by our longing.There, as if we were paintedby some unknown impressionist.

~ Ruth Stone

Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imaginedfuture, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love ora passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convincedthat even the smallest particle of the surrounding world wascharged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, andone would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind-loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by thehigh, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, somany and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like firefliesin the perfumed heat of summer night.

~ Mark Strand

How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it's so slow and sweet and everlasting.

~ Graham Swift

Many contemporary critics of higher education similarly posit a Golden Age but no one knows when it was supposed to exist.

~ Mark C. Carnes

College was at the heart of his sentimental imagination.

~ Rick Perlstein

Nostalgia is the only acceptable form of sadness.

~ Will Advise

it's good to have things done withwhen they don't workit's also good not to hateor even forgetthe person you've failed with.

~ Charles Bukowski

Between the MilesI have always counted the miles.Sometimes they came quick,Other times slow.The distance between things,The way I could know.Close could feel far,And far could feel near.The miles that passed too quickly,The ones I ran out of fear.They weren’t all the same,So I had been told,The unmarked trails,And the days I was bold.Some miles went down,Spiraling so low,When I was afraid to look forward,There was nowhere to go.The sunset came fast,And the day turned to night,But the trails could be endless,If I looked at them right.Everything I knew,All I was told,The conversations left behind,The people who grew old.When the miles stretched out before me,I wanted to sew them at the seam,Looking forward and then back,Holding everything in between.

~ Jacqueline Simon Gunn

There is nothing more agonising than the memory of good times when you are going through a difficult period in life. Life moves in only one direction - forward, but the memoirs of years gone by keep on haunting one’s soul till the time one is alive. Nostalgia can be more painful than a surgeon’s knife.

~ Anurag Shourie

Nostalgia is a necessary thing, I believe, and a way for all of us to find peace in that which we have accomplished, or even failed to accomplish. At the same time, if nostalgia precipitates actions to return to that fabled, rosy-painted time, particularly in one who believes his life to be a failure, then it is an empty thing, doomed to produce nothing but frustration and an even greater sense of failure.

~ R.a. Salvatore