Nostalgia Quotes

Sweet as the past may be, it best remains pressed between the pages of memory, savoured for a moment or two on quiet Sunday afternoons.

~ Indu Muralidharan

Nostalgia is powerful. It is natural, human to long for the past, particularly when we can remember our histories as better than they were.

~ Roxane Gay

The past will disappear if we forget we existed.

~ Damond Jiniya

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.

~ Antal Szerb

There’s a ghost of a dream that you don’t even try to shake free off because you’re too in love with the way she haunts you.

~ Kamila Shamsie

It’s not a crime to wish for other worlds. You’ll get taxed for it but they can’t throw you in jail for creating your own private world…yet. Dramatics are fun, an indulgence. ‘You can’t go backward,’ ‘You can’t live in the past,’ they tell you. Why not? ‘You’ve got to put all that behind you and move on to other things,’ they say. Bullshit! These are all expressions of modern disposability. It’s a mediocritizing technique—trying to get rid of what I call ‘past orthodoxies.’ It’s our past that makes us unique, therefore it’s our past that economic interests want to rob from us, so they can sell us a new, improved future. Society now depends on a disposable world—out with the old, in with the new, including relationships. But how we weep and wish we could hold onto those cherished moments forever, to those long-whispered dreams, those tortured nights—how we want to grasp them and stop them from sifting through our fingers. I say, ‘Don’t let it happen. Keep things the way you want them and let the rest of the world be duped.

~ Anton Szandor Lavey

The danger of restorative nostalgia lies in its belief that the mutilated 'wholeness' of the body politic can be repaired. But the reflective nostalgic understands deep down that loss is irrecoverable: Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world. In pop terms, Morrissey is the supreme poet of reflective nostalgia.

~ Simon Reynolds

Lewis had experienced more trauma than most of his modern readers ever will.

~ Alister E. Mcgrath

I could take a walk with my wife and try to explain the ghosts I can't stop speaking to. Or I could read all those books piling upabout the beginning of the end of understanding...Meanwhile, it's such a beautiful morning,the changing colors, the hypnotic light.I could sit by the window watching the leaves,which seem to know exactly how to fallfrom one moment to the next. Or I could loseeverything and have to begin over again.

~ Philip Schultz

I was willing to yield to nostalgia, that melancholy residue of desire.

~ Marguerite Yourcenar

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia.

~ Mary Schmich

Advice is a form of Nostalgia

~ Mary Schmich

See, that's the problem with putting too much stock in the old days. You remember all the GOOD stuff, but you forget about the time you got spanked by your best friend's mom.

~ Jeff Kinney

He couldn’t believe that sleep had robbed him of this spectacle night after night. Such are the writer’s privileges, he thought, nostalgic already for the present.

~ César Aira

Was it possible to feel nostalgic about something that had never happened to him, possible for nostalgia to be taken in by the body as a free pathogen to infect the consciousness with stray sentiments? Perhaps, in his dreams, he had traveled back in time, or even drifted into another dimension of space-time and inhabited the body, experiences, and nostalgia of another. To even envisage so allowed the trauma of those lost moments, though not his own, to draw from him a certain envy for the entity in whose memories he had basked vicariously. . .Perhaps, nostalgia was a microorganism. . .the bacterium that infected. . . Yes. . .maybe he was sick.

~ Ashim Shanker

If you want to be with somebody who gets you, you prefer collusion to desire, safety to excitement (sometimes good things to prefer but not always the things most wanted). The wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as adults, to the grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers of the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be, among many other things our most violent form of nostalgia.

~ Adam Phillips

Nostalgia dies in the pit of my throat from lack of exercise and I buried the word six feet under the pronunciation of hopeful tomorrows.

~ Taylor Patton

Parched by the deprivation of your love for so long made me forget what a cup brimming with love, on my lips, felt like. Everything that now wets it, only wrinkles it with a bland taste.

~ Abhita Jain

Super 8 film is the language of silence.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

This sweet-bitter scentIs still making me faintEnduring the painThat makes me insane.Trying to smile everydayTo hide the feelings I bearHide in bed and layPraying to ease the fear.The scent of perfumeIs the reason of my consciousnessIt wakens the inner loomAnd brings back the memories.

~ Angie Pandan

Underwater madness slipping into a haze, drowning and choking in repugnant nostalgic thoughts.

~ Karen Quan

At this time in his life Zinkoff sees no difference between the stars in the sky and the stars in his mother's plastic Baggie. He believes that stars fall from the sky sometimes, and that his mother goes around collecting them like acorns. He believes she has to use heavy gloves and dark sunglasses because the fallen stars are so hot and shiny. She puts them in the freezer for forty-five minutes, and when they come out they are flat and silver and sticky on the back and ready for his shirts.

~ Jerry Spinelli

There were always those passengers who came aboard bearing grudges against the modern age.

~ Erik Larson

In the Catskills, nostalgia runs backwards. The upwardly mobile Jewish masses of the 1950s and 1960s have been replaced by the Jews of 19th century Poland.

~ Kevin Haworth

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 Creationwith my back -- with Dogtownover the Crown of gravelly hillIt is not bad to be pissed off

~ Charles Olson

Why was everyone so interested in her now? When it was too late to change anything? What was the point?

~ Anne Cassidy

In the quagmire of feelings and emotions that engulf us on our drab and monotonous days and starry, resplendent nights, the ones that bring back past memories hold a special place, almost a unique pedestal, in our hearts! The distinct fragrance of nostalgia that serenades us in our minds is incomparable and is akin to a feeling of ecstasy. A feeling that hovers in our minds for a humongous period of time, one that takes us to leviathan heights in the midst of chaos and cacophony. It is as if we found a new elixir that rejuvenates us and makes us spring back into life.

~ Avijeet Das

Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar...

~ William Faulkner

From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions - fear, desire, anger - serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost . . . .

~ David Nicholls

People leave traces of themselves where they feel most comfortable, most worthwhile.

~ Haruki Murakami

For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? --some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning--indeed they did.

~ Virginia Woolf

Yeah, you’re right about having entire rooms full of film and photos… in that Sydney Mines house I have a darkroom, I have boxes of film and home movie footage… I have a few projectors, I have piles of Kodachrome slides… I like photographs. The world is always running away from society and the only way to keep the stuff that’s happened in the past is by taking photographs, I can keep memories of things alive with photographs,” Alecto responded. “People say that a time machine can’t be invented, but they’ve already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world’s first time machines… The steel mill, the coal mines, the train tracks, the smog in the sky, I’ve been able to rescue it on super-8 and Kodachrome, and no one can remediate those photographs, I can keep them as long as I want to.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered...the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls...bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory

~ Marcel Proust

Memories are fragile, you try to grab them and they skitter away in various directions. Trying to gather them together to write them out is difficult, they resist, get clouded and escape as wisps of smoke. Nothing seems as crystal clear as it once was, a milky film of opacity envelopes everything. Odd details stand out in one’s mind, not a continuum. A fragrance, an odour, the smell of toast burning perhaps or whiff of jasmine, a shade of pink, a flower pressed between the pages of a book, brings on a sharp burst of memories that drown you with their immediacy.

~ Kiran Manral

Her grandparents’ house was an old crammed up space just like all the others there, but to Sofia it had the luxuries of a palace and the reverence of a church.

~ Effrosyni Moschoudi

And all these things she always counted on to revisit, they made up a map, the map of a true home. It was the only place where she felt she had an identity and a history behind her.

~ Effrosyni Moschoudi

Now, obviously, all old people seem cool whenever we see black-and-white images of their younger selves. It's human nature to inject every old picture with positive abstractions. We can't help ourselves. We all do it. We want those things to be true, because we all hope future generations will have the same thoughts when they come across forgotten photographs of us.

~ Chuck Klosterman

Nostalgia is a lane of calm comfort, charming even a complacent heart!

~ Balroop Singh

As he turns around and her eyes meet his, she lets go off the breath that she had been holding back. All the words she had practised to say when the moment arrived, dissolve at the tip of her tongue. All the things she wanted him to know escape her in the thick blanket of nostalgia that wraps itself around her.

~ Faraaz Kazi

I handed the photo back to her. The caretaker gazed at it as if it were a lucky charm, a return ticket to her youth.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón