Nostalgia Quotes

As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.

~ Willa Cather

Why don’t we keep track of the happy moments, so that afterward we will believe them? Is he the same man Was he really sincere?

~ Naguib Mahfouz

The log on the fire: is it dreaming of the forest?

~ Marty Rubin

At his age, it can be overwhelming and painful to harbor a thought accompanied by too much nostalgia. Not that he wanted to. Mabel, in her final years, had stopped listening to music. The songs of her teenage years brought her back to people and feelings of that time - people she could never see again and sensations that were no longer coming. It was too much for her. There are people who can manage such things. There are those of us who can no longer walk, but can close our eyes and remember a summer hike through a field, or the feeling of cool grass beneath our feet, and smile. Who still have the courage to embrace the past, and give it life and a voice in the present. But Mabel was not one of those people. Maybe she lacked that very form of courage. Or maybe her humanity was so complete, so expansive, that she would be crushed by her capacity to imagine the love that was gone.

~ Derek B. Miller

I long for the days when I was One with the one who was the only one I could be One with.

~ Faith Tigere

We talked for four hours. I don't remember most of it, but often a little moment in an unrelated conversation or alone on the street will trigger a memory of it I didn't know I had. So I know it's all there somewhere.

~ B.j. Novak

We talked for four hours. I don't remember most of it, but often a little moment in an unrelated conversation or alone on the street will trigger a memory of it that I didn't know I had. So I know it's all there somewhere.

~ B.j. Novak

for those memories are nowjust like these little kittensI hold in my handsthose can be kissedand treasuredbut not held too tightly.

~ Sanober Khan

O for those days when these tired metaphors were teenagers too, when it was still possible to recite ‘Daffodils’ and feel thrilled as you gazed at the golden laburnum in bloom. Recognising clichés is a sign of aging. Sweet as the past may be, it best remains pressed within the pages of memory, savoured for a moment ortwo on quiet Sunday afternoons.

~ Indu Muralidharan

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.

~ Bhavya Kaushik

Upstairs, in the cupboard, he had a box of things he had saved as a boy and a young man. He hadn't looked into it in twenty years or more. Nothing fancy or valuable, but things that had meant something to him at one time. He found it, and found the key, and carried it downstairs without opening it.

~ Jane Smiley

We all leave behind bits of loose thread. Old operations, old enemies. They pull at you, like memories of old lovers.

~ Daniel Silva

It seems sometimes that we get so caught up in missing the past, or looking forward to the future, that we forget that this, right here and now, was once the days we longed for and will soon be the ones we miss.

~ John A. Ashley

Don’t ever feel bad that someone couldn’t give you all of their heart. Be grateful that you can take the least complicated part of their soul with you, wherever you go. This is more than some people will ever have.

~ Shannon L. Alder

I'm just sorry. Sorry that there won't be any more camping trips for kids or rock bands or even new books to read. No more movies or fresh bags of popcorn. It really sucks when you think about it. Of course, there is the possibility that we might be able to win this war, but not for a very long time. Probably longer than you and I will ever exist in this world.I try not to think about it.Sometimes it's all I ever think about.

~ Jeyn Roberts

Not very long ago I was driving with my husband on the back roads of Grey County, which is to the north and east of Huron County. We passed a country store standing empty at a crossroads. It had old-fashioned store windows, with long narrow panes. Out in front there was a stand for gas pumps which weren't there anymore. Close beside it was a mound of sumac trees and strangling vines, into which all kinds of junk had been thrown. The sumacs jogged my memory and I looked back at the store. It seemed to me that I had been here once, and the the scene was connected with some disappointment or dismay. I knew that I had never driven this way before in my adult life and I did not think I could have come here as a child. It was too far from home. Most of our drives out of town where to my grandparents'house in Blyth--they had retired there after they sold the farm. And once a summer we drove to the lake at Goderich. But even as I was saying this to my husband I remembered the disappointment. Ice cream. Then I remembered everything--the trip my father and I had made to Muskoka in 1941, when my mother was already there, selling furs at the Pine Tree Hotel north of Gravehurst.

~ Alice Munro

Cabel felt the familiar nostalgic excitement of the endless possibilities encapsulated in a summers' night at Silver Beach. He smiled at himself as a boy and, more ruefully, at the man who now stood on the worn planks of the boardwalk. This night held no possibilities for him, though it was pleasant to remember a time when it did.

~ Erin Farwell

Aching familiar in a way that made me wish I was still eight. Eight was before death or divorce or heartbreak. Eight was just eight. Hot dogs and peanut butter, mosquito bites and splinters, bikes and boogie boards. Tangled hair, sunburned shoulders, Judy Blume, in bed by nine thirty.

~ Jenny Han

She didn't want to forget how deeply she had loved him, how important it had been to her; she felt as if to discard the memory would be a betrayal of her younger self.

~ Harriet Evans

She ordered a martini and encouraged me to, but said she couldn't drink it with her medication. She just liked seeing it in front of her, like the old days, all set to do its little magic.

~ Richard Ford

I am sick of old ghosts and I just want to feel safe again without the haunts of old vulnerabilities.

~ Donna Lynn Hope

How can days and happenings and moments so good become so quickly ugly, and for no reason, for no real reason? Just - change.With nothing causing it.

~ Philip K. Dick

Nostalgia is the only friend that stays with you forever.

~ Damien Echols

In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

~ Joan Didion

I can hardly keep track of the things I don't know, but every now and then comes an ignorance that makes me nostalgic.

~ Erri De Luca

I had a dream about you last night. We were in your old Civic. Nine Inch Nails was turned up on the stereo and I was taking pictures of you behind the wheel with my disposable camera. We went through the drive through at El Pollo Loco, placed an order for a hundred bucks worth of food, and then just drove off at the window. I miss being stupid with you.

~ Crystal Woods

I do believe that people can only be in love with one landscape in their lifetime. One can appreciate and enjoy many geographies, but there is only one that one feels in one’s bones.

~ J.m. Coetzee

The child I wasis just one breath away from me.

~ Sheniz Janmohamed

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.

~ Dan Chaon

No nostalgia is felt as keenly as nostalgia for things that never existed.

~ Rabih Alameddine

Belittling nostalgia is a frightened man's parlor trick. Be grateful for any prize. Even a paper fortress, albeit briefly, provides shelter from the rain.

~ Amy Koppelman

The older they get, the better they get when they were younger

~ Jim Bouton

Our misconception in viewing the past lies in assuming that doubt and fear, permit, protests, violence and hate were not equally present.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

If we don't remember where we came from, we'll go back there.

~ David Mcgee

The Luddite impulse is strong among Christians, and our first reaction is to rage against the machine.

~ Kevin Deyoung

There is nothing quite like a dose of unvarnished history for inoculating people against the tendency to indict the present for failing to measure up to a sentimental notion of the past.

~ George F. Will

Because that world's gone. The world where people walked around whistling that music. All the madrigal singers in the world can't make that other one real again. It's like dinosaurs. We can put them back together perfectly, bone for bone, but we don't know what they smelled like, what kind of sounds they made, or how big they really looked standing in the grass under all those fossil fern trees. Even the sunlight must have been different, and the wind. What can bones tell you about a kind of wind that doesn't blow anymore?

~ Peter S. Beagle

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

~ William Faulkner

You can go other places, all right - you can live on the other side of the world, but you can't ever leave home

~ Sue Monk Kidd

Looking at the elementary schoolers in their colorful T-shirts from various day camps, Percy felt a twinge of sadness. He should be at Camp Half-Blood right now, settling into his cabin for the summer, teaching sword-fighting lessons in the arena, playing pranks on the other counselors. These kids had no idea just how crazy a summer camp could be.

~ Rick Riordan