Nostalgia Quotes

“Gonzaga was the kind of place you’d not even think about loving until you’d left it for a couple of years.”

“As a historian, I've spent much of my career warning people about the dangers of nostalgia.”

“In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.”

“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?”

“How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it's so slow and sweet and everlasting.”

“I am suddenly comsumed by nostalgia for the little girl who was me, who loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol cough drops, who could keep a secret.”

“I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.”

“There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it.”

“I kicked college nostalgia in my late 20s. As much as I loved college and treasure the memories, I no longer want to go back.”

“I don't think nostalgia is a healthy modality. But nostalgia and a sense of history are not the same thing. Nostalgia is a dysfunction of the historical impulse, or a corruption of the historical impulse.”

“They might be talking in perfect latin tongue and without warning begin to talk in perfect anglo tongue and keep it up like that, alternating between a thing that believes itself to be perfect and a thing that believes itself to be perfect, morphing back and forth between two beasts until out of carelessness or clear intent they suddenly stop switching tongues and start speaking that other one. In it brims nostalgia for the land they left or never knew when they use the words with which they name objects; while actions are alluded to with an anglo verb conjugated latin-style, pinning on a sonorous tail from back there. Using in one tongue the word for a thing in the other makes the attributes of both resound: if you say Give me fire when they say Give me a light, what is not to be learned about fire, light and the act of giving? It’s not another way of saying things: these are new things”

“There are bands that I got into when I was 15, when I was mad at my dad and just wanted to be different. I don't think I'd give those bands half a chance now. But I hold some kind of nostalgia for them that I won't let go. Bands like Minor Threat and Black Flag.”

“Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.”

“One day we're going to look back at $1,700 with nostalgia. People are going to be shocked at how inexpensive gold was when it could be snapped up for such a bargain price.”

“Why have we had to invent Eden, to live submerged in the nostalgia of a lost paradise, to make up utopias, propose a future for ourselves?”

“In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.”

“Yes it’s me, I myself, what I turned out to be, (…) I’m the one here in myself, it’s me. (…) Whatever I was, whatever I wasn’t—it’s all in what I am. Whatever I wanted, whatever I didn’t want—all of this has shaped me. Whatever I loved, or stopped loving—in me it’s the same nostalgia (Álvaro de Campos)”

“Somewhere between buying 25 friendship bands and passing by the shop with a smile looking at kids buying the bands, we grew up”

“The past will disappear if we forget we existed".”

“Theatres are curious places, magician's trick-boxes where the golden memories of dramtic triumphs linger like nostalgic ghosts, and where the unexplainable, the fantastic, the tragic, the comic and the absurd are routine occurences on and off the stage. Murders, mayhem, politcal intrigue, lucrative business, secret assignations, and of course, dinner.”