Nostalgia
Quotes - It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back
“Things
aren't what they used to be' is the rallying cry of small minds. When men say
things used to be better, they invariably mean they were better for them,
because they were young, and had all their hopes intact. The world is bound to
look a darker place as you slide into the grave.”
―
Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold
“It
shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back.”
―
Sue Monk Kidd, Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story
“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, The Mark of Athena
“Strange,
how the best moments of our lives we scarcely notice except in looking back.”
―
Joe Abercrombie, Red Country
“Nostalgia
is an illness
for
those who haven't realized
that
today
is
tomorrow's nostalgia.”
―
Zeena Schreck
“But
in that moment I understood what they say about nostalgia, that no matter if
you're thinking of something good or bad, it always leaves you a little emptier
afterward.”
―
John Corey Whaley, Noggin
“Marco
would much rather wait, buy his mother a lovely house and then bring Isabela to
visit, allowing his poverty to take on a romantic tinge, something from the
past, roots safely buried.”
―
Margarita Barresi, A Delicate Marriage
“The
past is for learning from and letting go. You can't revisit it. It vanishes.”
―
Adele Parks, Young Wives' Tales
“Tuesday,
November 17th. 1896
...
I
remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a
child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of
childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense.”
―
Beatrix Potter, The Journal of Beatrix Potter from 1881-1897
“Perhaps
a creature of so much ingenuity and deep memory is almost bound to grow
alienated from his world, his fellows, and the objects around him. He suffers
from a nostalgia for which there is no remedy upon earth except as it is to be
found in the enlightenment of the spirit--some ability to have a perceptive
rather than an exploitive relationship with his fellow creatures.”
―
Loren Eiseley
“The
slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of
expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as
great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On
will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by
The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold
rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the
current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be
accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were
established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a
formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.
It
is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the
future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive,
traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to
an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus.
Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational
restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism
– with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of
labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure
were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and
mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday
experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an
increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the
present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present
to grasp and articulate anymore.”
―
Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost
Futures
“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, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy
“And
so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest
nostalgias are born.”
―
Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
“For
children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the
present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little
for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is
what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up,’ there is always an edge of
disbelief—how could they ever be other than what they are?”
―
Ian McEwan, The Child in Time
“It's
one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee
writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's
something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed's drugstore on the
square and actually listen to them. The reason you can't go home again is not
because the down-home folks are mad at you--they're not, don't flatter
yourself, they couldn't care less--but because once you're in orbit and you
return to Reed's drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen
minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor
store, or head back to Martha's Vineyard, where at least you can put a
tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart
is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.”
―
Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
“I
would never see her again, except in memory. She was here, and now she's gone.
There is no middle ground. Probably is a word that you may find south of the
border. But never, ever west of the sun.”
―
Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
“Where
ignorance is bliss,
'Tis
folly to be wise.
-
Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”
―
Thomas Gray, Gray and Collins: Poetical Works
