Nostalgia
Quotes - Nostalgia is a necessary thing
“I
don’t have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They’re upstairs in my
socks.”
―
Groucho Marx
“I'd
trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday.”
―
Kris Kristofferson
“We
were nostalgic for a time that wasn't yet over.”
―
Nina LaCour, We Are Okay
“Over
the years I'd lodged him in the permanent past, my pluperfect lover, put him on
ice, stuffed him with memories and mothballs like a hunted ornament
confabulating with the ghost of all my evenings. I'd dust him off from time to
time and then put him back on the mantelpiece. He no longer belonged to earth
or to life. All I was likely to discover at this point wasn't just how distant
were the paths we'd taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike
me--a loss I didn't mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt
when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we've stopped
thinking of things we lost and may never have cared for.”
―
André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name
“when
we were kids
laying
around the lawn
on
our
bellies
we
often talked
about
how
we'd
like to
die
and
we
all
agreed
on the
same
thing;
we'd
all
like
to die
fucking
(although
none
of us
had
done
any
fucking)
and
now
that
we
are hardly
kids
any
longer
we
think more
about
how
not
to
die
and
although
we're
ready
most
of
us
would
prefer
to
do
it
alone
under
the
sheets
now
that
most
of
us
have
fucked
our
lives
away.”
―
Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
“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, The Mermaid Chair
“Memory
believes before knowing remembers.
[Light
in August]”
―
William Faulkner, Light in August
“There
is something incredibly nostalgic and significant about the annual cascade of
autumn leaves.”
―
Joe L. Wheeler
“When
you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago--and not in
general terms, but in highly specific detail--it's disturbing to realize how
certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you
do. It's astonishing to consider all the things from your past that used to
happen all the time but (a) never happen anymore, and (b) never even cross your
mind. It's almost like those things didn't happen. Or maybe it seems like they
just happened to someone else. To someone you don't really know. To someone you
just hung out with for one night, and now you can't even remember her name.”
―
Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“Ten
long trips around the sun since I last saw that smile, but only joy and
thankfulness that on a tiny world in the vastness, for a couple of moments in
the immensity of time, we were one.”
―
Ann Druyan
“Nostalgia
is a necessary thing, I believe, and a way for all of us to find peace in that
which we have accomplished, or even failed to accomplish. At the same time, if
nostalgia precipitates actions to return to that fabled, rosy-painted time,
particularly in one who believes his life to be a failure, then it is an empty
thing, doomed to produce nothing but frustration and an even greater sense of
failure.”
―
R.A. Salvatore, Streams of Silver
“There
are a few moments in your life when you are truly and completely happy, and you
remember to give thanks. Even as it happens you are nostalgic for the moment,
you are tucking it away in your scrapbook.”
―
David Benioff, When the Nines Roll Over and Other Stories
“One
is always at home in one's past...”
―
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
“People
leave traces of themselves where they feel most comfortable, most worthwhile.”
―
Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
“Philosophy
is really nostalgia, the desire to be at home.”
―
Novalis
“That's
most interesting. But I was no more a mind-reader then than today. I was
weeping for an altogether different reason. When I watched you dancing that
day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific,
efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh,
cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her
breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and
she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It
wasn't really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke
my heart. And I've never forgotten.”
―
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
“Captain
Scultetus said, “Sir, I am the commander of the Swakopmund Coast Guard. My name
and rank are Captain Oskar Scultetus! I
respectfully beg you not to open fire upon my city!”
―
Michael G. Kramer, His Forefathers and Mick
“I
sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating
material for future nostalgias.”
―
Vikram Seth, From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet
“Our
plans for the future made us laugh and feel close, but those same plans somehow
made anything more than temporary between us seem impossible. It was the first
time I’d ever had the feeling of missing someone I was still with.”
―
Stuart Dybek, The Coast of Chicago: Stories
