Nostalgia Quotes

It's a peculiar kind of dissatisfaction, a bittersweet nostalgia for a moment not yet past.

~ Christina Baker Kline

And the further they go, the more they'll remember, they can take it from me.

~ Rohinton Mistry

People I had never seen before flocked in, their faces showing a longing you never saw for cake. People's eyes lit up for a cupcake, cake seemed to signal celebration. But their eyes got filmy, watery, misty when we handed them a slice of pie. Pie was memory. Nostalgia. Pie made people recall simpler, maybe happier times.

~ Judith Fertig

If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency.

~ Milan Kundera

I think it's my memory of this period that makes me fantasise about living in the country. In reality I know there would be no shops and I would kill myself.

~ Frankie Boyle

Nostalgia is missing what might come back.

~ Will Advise

Nostalgia. It haunts us, it destroys us, and sometimes, its sentimentality consumes us piece by piece so that we may realize our once-familiar circumstance may never again return. It is a state of mind best indulged infrequently.

~ Bryant A. Loney

However, I suppose VH1 *is* selling me something; they're selling nostalgia, which means they're selling my own memories back to me, which means they're selling me to me.

~ Chuck Klosterman

I missed you more now than I had when I lost you. I was forgetting the bad things faster than I forgot the good, and the changing ratio felt a little bit like falling in love even though I was actually speaking to you less and less.

~ Alexandra Kleeman

The hours were long, but the days were short, and as much as I willed it to never come, the end of summer arrived anyway.

~ Chelsey Philpot

I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It's full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being 'objective.' Nostalgia for what? I don't know. Because I'd rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the 'Anna' of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

~ Doris Lessing

Allie sighed. It was an old yellow sound, like turning pages.

~ Stephen King

...I have to admit that I've ... always felt burdened by nostalgia, by a desire to stop time, to recapture things that have been lost. A sense that everything, absolutely everything, is on a journey from which there's no return.

~ Natalia Sanmartín Fenollera

I want each day to last forever . . . It's a peculiar kind of dissatisfaction, a bittersweet nostalgia for a moment not yet past. Even in the midst of a pleasurable outing I'm aware of how ephemeral it is.

~ Christina Baker Kline

Do you know why they call me the Count? Because I love to count! Ah-ha

~ Richard Bachman

Maybe that's just what nostalgia is: a willingness to embrace the pain of the past.

~ Sarah Domet

There was an irony and a paradox here: Franco thought of Pontito constantly, saw it in fantasy, depicted it, as infinitely desirable – and yet he had a profound reluctance to return. But it is precisely such a paradox that lies at the heart of nostalgia – for nostalgia is about a fantasy that never takes place, one that maintains itself by not being fulfilled. And yet such fantasies are not just idle daydreams or fancies; they press toward some fulfillment, but an indirect one - the fulfillment of art. These, at least, are the terms that D. Geahchan, the French psychoanalyst, has used. With reference in particular to the greatest of nostalgies, Proust, the psychoanalyst David Werman speaks of an 'aesthetic crystallization of nostalgia' - nostalgia raised to the level of art and myth.

~ Oliver Sacks

Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare ourselves and our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed.

~ Brené Brown

I have a habit of being an archaeologist of my own past, a sentimental collector of personal artefacts which may at first glance appear random, but each of which holds a unique significance. As the years pass me by, I find that the number of objects within my possession begins to accumulate. A torn map. A sealed letter. A boat full of paper animals. Each item encapsulates within itself a story, akin to an outward manifestation of my inner journey.

~ Agnes Chew

I miss the thrill of your self-destructive heart that melts in the sun like chocolate, bittersweet and incandescent.

~ Maria Elena

I miss it like an ex-con misses the other inmates.

~ Megan Miranda

If there ever were one moment where everything worked for us, where we lived in harmony and at ease with our natures, then we would still be there. There is no garden to return to, no idyllic perfect childhood, no enwombed state. The Garden of Eden was boring, childhood is a nightmare we should all be grateful to be done with, and your mother smoked while she was pregnant and poisoned you in the womb with artificial sugar substitutes. The best thing any of us can do is just to keep fucking up in a forward motion, and see what comes out of it.

~ Jessa Crispin

Saudade.A nostalgic longing to be near again to something or someone that is distant, or that has been loved and then lost; the love that remains.

~ Anonymous

Before VCRs, people used to decorate the tops of their TVs with family photos.

~ Marshall Thornton

I love the way he smelled whenever his head dipped close to hear what I was saying—like the sun striking th cheek of a tomato, or soap drying in the hood of a car. I loved the way his hand felt on my spine. I loved.

~ Jodi Picoult

My dear, you never will understand time, will you? You're always trying to be the things you were, instead of the person you are tonight. Why do you save those ticket stubs and theater programs? They'll only hurt you later. Throw them away, my dear.

~ Ray Bradbury

What I want, more than anything, is to turn back time a little. To become the kid I used to be, who believed whatever my mother said was one hundred percent true and right without looking hard enough to see the hairline cracks.

~ Jodi Picoult

I'm nostalgic for a better tomorrow.

~ Brian Spellman

... nostalgia was once thought to be a mental illness or a physical affliction; for me, it was both.

~ Laura Mchugh

He tilted the box toward a chipped Pottery Barn blue bowl, and the little blue clumps, like cerulean rat turds, tumbled out, hitting the porcelain with a surprisingly metallic thud. It sounded like pennies dumped into an aluminum trash can.

~ Eric Spitznagel

I am old enough to enjoy a bit of nostalgia, but wise enough to know that there haven't been any good ol' days since Eden (the garden, not the prime minister).

~ Ron Brackin

So are we going to eat some Boo Berry or what? John said, leaping out of his seat and toward the refrigerator.

~ Eric Spitznagel

Graceful. Lean. Coordinated as she whirls, though how she knows what dancing is, [her grandfather] could never guess.The song plays on. He lets it go too long. The antenna is still up, probably dimly visible against the sky, the whole attic might as well shine like a beacon. But in the candlelight, in the sweet rush of a concerto, Marie-Laure bites her lower lip, and her face gives off a secondary glow, reminding him of the marshes beyond the town walls, in those winter dusks when the sun has set but isn't fully swallowed, and big patches of red pools of light burn - places he used to go with his brother, in what seems like lifetimes ago.

~ Anthony Doerr

He pressed the herb to his nose. Thyme. He loved the name and he loved the smell. He looked out the window at the illusion of deep woods. His face too was out there, hung on a tree and returning his gaze. He drew close to the glass to lose the mirror effect. Outside, the forest panted its beefy halitus; the soil held the breaths of gloom in its dampness. Fifteen thousand years ago a glacier had sliced through this park he was living in, bringing with it the nutrients from all its travels. Fifteen thousand years ago human beings were the fable that frightened the dark woods.

~ Nancy Zafris

When shall I cease to regret you! – When learn to feel a home elsewhere! – Oh! Happy house, could you know what I suffer in now viewing you from this spot, from whence perhaps I may view you no more! – And you, ye well-known trees! – but you will continue the same. – No leaf will decay because we are removed, nor any branch become motionless although we can observe you no longer! – No; you will continue the same; unconscious of the pleasure or the regret you occasion, and insensible of any change in those who walk under your shade! – But who will remain to enjoy you?

~ Jane Austen

All you will have is the present. Waste no energy crying over yesterday or dreaming of tomorrow. Nostalgia is fatiguing and destructive, it is the vice of the expatriate. You must put down roots as if they were forever, you must have a sense of permanence.

~ Isabel Allende

These rotary dials were like meditation, they forced you to slow down and concentrate. If you polled the next number too soon, you had to start over from the top.

~ Rainbow Rowell

an old villa surrounded by a garden looked to them like the image of a comforting home, the dream of an idyll long past.

~ Milan Kundera

I roam the streets, silent and still,I look for You, in each and everything.I have come a long way from myself,so away,so long, that I,myself have become a memory.And so i seek Your gaze, to See myself,But what am i ? without Your touch ?How distant You are, yet How close Iam,this place holds a fortune, for my lost self.

~ Syed Murtaza Haroon

Until then her view of time was the present moving forward and devouring the future; she either feared its swiftness (when she was awaiting something difficult) or rebelled at its slowness (when she was awaiting something fine). Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past. She sees a young man disconnecting himself from her life and going away, forevermore out of her reach. Mesmerized, all she can do is watch this piece of her life move off; all she can do is watch it and suffer. She is experiencing a brand-new feeling called nostalgia.

~ Milan Kundera