Quotes about Nostalgia

I will never joke about old soldiers who try to get to reunions to talk over the war again. To talk of old times with old friends is the greatest thing in the world.

People tend to glorify the past, especially when they are struggling with the future.

And the men that were boys when I was a boy Shall sit and drink with me.

One day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

The girls chirped and chatted like uncaged warblers. They were delirious with joy... Intoxications of life's morning! Enchanted years! The wing of a dragonfly trembles! Oh, reader, whoever you may be, do you have such memories? Have you walked in the underbrush, pushing aside branches for the charming head behind you? Have you slid laughing, down some slope wet with rain, with the woman you loved?

It is painful to break the sad links to the past

There is still a certain grace in a dead festival. It has been happy.

Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.

The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)

In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there.

During the twenty years of Odesseus' absence, the people of Ithaca retained many recollections of him but never felt nostalgia for him. Whereas Odysseus did suffer nostalgia, and remembered almost nothing. ..... For four long books of the Odyssey he had retraced in detail his adventures before the dazzled Phaeacians. But in Ithaca he was not a stranger, he was one of their own, so it never occurred to anyone to say, 'Tell us!