Nostalgia
Quotes - It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait
for our futures
“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
“The
Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering."
So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
―
Milan Kundera, Ignorance
“Remembrance
of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
―
Marcel Proust
“It
is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our
futures.”
―
Ally Condie, Matched
“There
is no greater sorrow
Than
to recall a happy time
When
miserable.”
―
Dante Alighieri
“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
“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, Of Human Bondage
“Every
act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the
essence of being.”
―
Albert Camus, The Rebel
“How
often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.”
―
William C. Faulkner
“I
have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has
never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot
pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on
my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still
forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same.
Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot
forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more
essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is
in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a
yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.”
―
Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
“What
you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.”
―
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
“Maybe
it was the alcohol, maybe it was the truth, maybe I didn't want things to turn
abstract, but I felt I should say it, because this was the moment to say it,
because it suddenly dawned on me that this was why I had come, to tell him 'You
are the only person I'd like to say goodbye to when I die, because only then
will this thing I call my life make any sense. And if I should hear that you
died, my life as I know it, the me who is speaking with you now, will cease to
exist.”
―
André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name
“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, Mary
“We
are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing
what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a
corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost
as soon as it comes.”
―
Madeleine L'Engle, The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth
“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, The Sound and the Fury
“These
fragments I have shored against my ruins”
―
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems
“how
sad and bad and mad it was - but then, how it was sweet”
―
Robert Browning
“Sometimes
loneliness makes the loudest noise.”
―
Aaron Ben-Ze'ev
“Real
museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.”
―
Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence
“How
could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer
from the absence of a person who is present?
You
can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future
where the beloved is no more”
―
Milan Kundera, Identity
