Nostalgia Quotes

We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today. I don't think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great. If you're hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time.

~ Art Buchwald

...And nostalgia is a cancer. Nostalgia will fill your heart up with tumors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what you are. You're just an old fart dying of terminal nostalgia.

~ Sherman Alexie

We were nostalgic for a time that wasn't yet over.

~ Nina Lacour

Moments never stay, whether or not you ask them, they do not care, no moment cares, and the ones you wish could stretch out like a hammock for you to lie in, well, those moments leave the quickest and take everything good with them, little burglars, those moments, those hours, those days you loved the most.

~ Catherine Lacey

Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.

~ Giorgio Agamben

Have you ever wondered how nostalgia isnt what it used to be?

~ Jasper Fforde

There are no days more full than those we go back to.

~ Colum Mccann

I love how summer just wraps it’s arms around you like a warm blanket.

~ Kellie Elmore

Life used to move much more quickly when I was a girl. We needed to abbreviate just to keep up.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

The best times we’ve had on earth are usually with those we love.

~ Van Harden

The abbreviated exam week meant that Wednesday was the last day of school for us. And all day long, it was hard not to walk around, thinking about the lastness of it all.

~ John Green

I felt a pang -- a strange and inexplicable pang that I had never felt before. It was homesickness. Now, even more than I had earlier when I'd first glimpsed it, I longed to be transported into that quiet little landscape, to walk up the path, to take a key from my pocket and open the cottage door, to sit down by the fireplace, to wrap my arms around myself, and to stay there forever and ever.

~ Alan Bradley

You can't return to a place that no longer exists, luv.

~ Samantha Sotto

It's not like I'm all into nostalgia and history, it's just that I can't stand the way things are now

~ Novala Takemoto

I wonder what it felt to move to a country where you didn't grow up. I had thought about that often since my sister got married. Do you become a character in a story native to that land, or do you, somewhere in your heart, want to return to your homeland.

~ Banana Yoshimoto

I had been there before, I knew all about it.

~ Evelyn Waugh

Journey to the end of day, Come the fire-fly, Come the moon; Say a prayer for God's good grace And sleep with lore upon your face.

~ Clive Barker

When I was a kid, they had a saying, 'to err is human but to really fuck it up takes a computer.’

~ Benjamin R. Smith

…nostalgia is, by definition, the least authentic of all feelings.

~ Enrique De Hériz

We long to have again the vanished past, in spite of all its pain.

~ Sophocles

Dark came early and stayed full of lights and the shouts of children.

~ China Miéville

He decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.

~ Thomas Pynchon

No matter how fierce was the passion that gripped him, the fact is he was paralyzed, transfixed by the contemplation of his own past. Only something so momentous as to drive from his consciousness all thoughts of before and after could have propelled him forward. And with his eyes fixed on the past, he had no choice but to continue along its trajectory.

~ Sōseki Natsume

Anyway, those things would not have lasted long.The experience of the years shows it to me.But Destiny arrived in some haste and stopped them.The beautiful life was brief.But how potent were the perfumes,On how splendid a bed we lay,To what sensual delight we gave our bodies.An echo of the days of pleasure,An echo of the days drew near me,A little of the fire of the youth of both of us,Again I took in my hands a letter,And I read and reread till the light was gone.And melancholy, I came out on the balconyCame out to change my thoughts at least by looking atA little of the city that I loved,A little movement on the street and in the

~ Constantinos P. Cavafis

The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else's nostalgia

~ Pete Hamill

And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that—except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it.

~ Joan Didion

You may say, But wasn't this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.

~ Julian Barnes

And perhaps we have reason to be very grateful that, both as children and long afterwards, we are never allowed to guess how the absorbing pursuit of the moment will appear, not only to others, but to ourselves, a very short time hence.

~ Kenneth Grahame

PatriotismBreathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, 'This is my own, my native land!' Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd As home his footsteps he hath turn'dFrom wandering on a foreign strand? If such there breathe, go, mark him well; For him no Minstrel raptures swell; High though his titles, proud his name, Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;Despite those titles, power, and pelf, The wretch, concentred all in self, Living, shall forfeit fair renown, And, doubly dying, shall go down To the vile dust from whence he sprung,Unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung.

~ Walter Scott

The sixties are like a theme park to them. They wear the costume, buy their tickets, and they have the experience.

~ Douglas Coupland

Eraritjaritjaka albutjikaNkinjaba iturala albutjika ...His heart is filled with longing to turn for homeIn the heat of the sun to return home ...'Ulamba chant, Aboriginal Central Australia

~ Stuart Rintoul

...underneath that I'd said something else: we were both a couple of asswipes, and now only I'm an asswipe; why? And underneath that, something else: once an asswipe, always an asswipe.

~ Jennifer Egan

Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance.

~ Pat Conroy

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.

~ Simon Reynolds

The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.

~ Sherwood Anderson

Carefully squeezing through the forest of adults that crowded the aisles, feeling like an intruder in a forbidden temple, he cautiously pushed deeper into the newsstand and found a new paperback by a writer whose novel about vampires he had read and reread until the cover was falling apart. There had been an all-black cover on the vampire book. This new one gleamed like polished chrome. It was called THE SHINING, but it cost $2.50 and he had spent all but $1.25 of his weekly allowance on some STAR WARS stuff at the mall.

~ C. Dean Andersson

Nostalgic memory is a sudden encounter with the thingness of the thing that has been forgotten, not the continuous desire for possessions, whether past, present, or future.

~ Marjorie Garber

The PondAugust of another summer, and once again I am drinking the sunand the lilies again are spread across the water. I know now what they want is to touch each other. I have not been here for many yearsduring which time I kept living my life. Like the heron, who can only croak, who wishes he could sing, I wish I could sing. A little thanks from every throat would be appropriate. This is how it has been, and this is how it is: All my life I have been able to feel happiness, except whatever was not happiness, which I also remember. Each of us wears a shadow. But just now it is summer againand I am watching the lilies bow to each other, then slide on the wind and the tug of desire, close, close to one another, Soon now, I'll turn and start for home. And who knows, maybe I'll be singing.

~ Mary Oliver

Now and then I see a balloon caught in the power lines, holding on, waving, flapping softly in the evening air, and I wonder if somebody in some faraway city tried to send it to heaven the way my mother and I used to do.

~ Kenny Porpora

The idea that she would leave all of this - the rooms of the house once more familiar and warm and comforting - and go back to Brooklyn and not return for a long time again frightened her now. She knew as she sat on the edge of the bed and took her shoes off and then lay back with her arms behind her head that she had spent every day putting off all thought of her departure and what she would meet on her arrival.

~ Colm Tóibín