Quotes about Nostalgia

Now, surely, I am getting old, for my memory of myself as a young man seems now to be complete, as a story told. The young man leaps, and lands on an old man's legs.

and the very old men--some in their brushed Confederate uniforms--on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years.

When he saw the River again he knew it at once. He should have; it was now ineradicably a part of his past, his life; it would be a part of what he would bequeath, if that were in store for him.

Jews who long have drifted from the faith of their fathers... are stirred in their inmost parts when the old, familiar Passover sounds chance to fall upon their ears.

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

There are three things that grow more precious with age; old wood to burn, old books to read, and old friends to enjoy.

Memories were not always pleasant, she decided. Memories could bring pain, too.

Songs of Innocence

A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered.

If, for example, I saw my grandparents or my daughter for an instant, would I recognize them? Probably not, because in looking so hard for a way to keep them alive, remembering them in the most minimal details, I have been changing them, adorning them with qualities they may not have had. I have given them a destiny much more complex than the ones they lived.

I go, but I always remember you.

But that's how nostalgia is: a slow dance in a large circle. Memories don't organize themselves chronologically, they're like smoke, changing, ephemeral, and if they're not written down they fade into oblivion.