โ
Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.
โ
โ
John Green (Looking for Alaska)
โ
The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
โ
โ
Milan Kundera (Ignorance)
โ
Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on.
I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.
โ
โ
Jonathan Safran Foer
โ
In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
โ
โ
Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
โ
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the worldโs existence. All these half-tones of the soulโs consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
โ
โ
Fernando Pessoa
โ
Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.
โ
โ
Albert Camus (The Rebel)
โ
The past is a candle at great distance: too close to let you quit, too far to comfort you.
โ
โ
Amy Bloom (Away)
โ
The inside jokes weren't jokes anymore. They had become stories. Nobody brought up the bad names or the bad times. And nobody felt sad as long as we could postpone tomorrow with more nostalgia.
โ
โ
Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)
โ
It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures.
โ
โ
Ally Condie (Matched (Matched, #1))
โ
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
โ
โ
Marcel Proust
โ
There is no greater sorrow
Than to recall a happy time
When miserable.
โ
โ
Dante Alighieri
โ
There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it.
โ
โ
Shannon L. Alder
โ
We are homesick most for the places we have never known.
โ
โ
Carson McCullers
โ
Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
โ
โ
Vladimir Nabokov (Mary)
โ
Toska - noun /หtล-skษ/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.
"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.
โ
โ
Vladimir Nabokov
โ
We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
โ
โ
Carson McCullers
โ
Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar...
โ
โ
William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury)
โ
How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.
โ
โ
William Faulkner
โ
Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed.
โ
โ
Brenรฉ Brown
โ
What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.
โ
โ
Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
โ
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.
โ
โ
Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)
โ
We were nostalgic for a time that wasn't yet over.
โ
โ
Nina LaCour (We Are Okay)
โ
The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.
โ
โ
Gabriel Garcรญa Mรกrquez (Memories of My Melancholy Whores)
โ
Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.
โ
โ
Gabriel Garcรญa Mรกrquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
โ
It's a strange griefโฆ to die of nostalgia for something you you will never live.
โ
โ
Alessandro Baricco (Silk)
โ
How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present?
You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more
โ
โ
Milan Kundera (Identity)
โ
There is something incredibly nostalgic and significant about the annual cascade of autumn leaves.
โ
โ
Joe L. Wheeler
โ
Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.
โ
โ
John Green
โ
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
โ
โ
T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land and Other Poems)
โ
how sad and bad and mad it was - but then, how it was sweet
โ
โ
Robert Browning
โ
Sometimes loneliness makes the loudest noise.
โ
โ
Aaron Ben-Ze'ev
โ
Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.
โ
โ
Orhan Pamuk (The Museum of Innocence)
โ
I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.
โ
โ
Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)
โ
Philosophy is really nostalgia, the desire to be at home.
โ
โ
Novalis
โ
Nobody felt sad as long as we could postpone tomorrow with more nostalgia.
โ
โ
Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)
โ
We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.
โ
โ
Madeleine L'Engle (The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth)
โ
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.
โ
โ
David Benioff (When the Nines Roll Over and Other Stories)
โ
I donโt have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. Theyโre upstairs in my socks.
โ
โ
Groucho Marx
โ
In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.
โ
โ
John Williams (Stoner)
โ
I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.
โ
โ
Vikram Seth (From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet)
โ
I'd trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday.
โ
โ
Kris Kristofferson
โ
He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. But when he stood at the railing of the ship... only then did he understand to what extent he had been an easy vicitim to the charitible deceptions of nostalgia.
โ
โ
Gabriel Garcรญa Mรกrquez
โ
feeling a strange sense of nostalgia for a moment that was already in the process of happening.
โ
โ
Sally Rooney (Normal People)
โ
ูุทูู ูู ุงูู
ูุงู ุงูุฐู ุงุฑุชุฏูุช ููู ุฃูู ุณุฑูุงู ุทููู ูู ุญูุงุชูุ ููุนุจุช ุฃูู ู
ุจุงุฑุงุฉ ูุฑุฉ ูุฏู
ุ ูุณู
ุนุช ุฃูู ูุตูุฏุฉุ ููุชุจุช ุฃูู ุฎุทุงุจ ุญุจุ ูุชูููุช ุฃูู ุนููุฉ ู
ู ู
ุนูู
ู ุฃู ุฎุตูู
ู ูู ุงูู
ุฏุฑุณุฉ.. ูุทูู ูู ุงูู
ูุงู ุงูุฐู ุฐูุจุช ููู ููู
ุณุฌุฏ ูุฃูู ู
ุฑุฉ ูุญุฏูุ ูุฎูุนุช ุญุฐุงุกู ู
ุชุญุฏููุง ุตุฏููู ุฃู ููู ุฌูุงุฑู ูุชุฑูุง ุฃููู
ุง ุฃุทูู ูุงู
ุฉ.. ูุทูู ูู ุฃูู ู
ูุงู ุชู
ุฑูุบุช ุนูู ุนุดุจู ูู ุตุฑุงุน ู
ุน ุตุฏูู ูุฏูุฏ ู
ู ุฃุฌู ูุชุงุฉ ูุง ุชุนุฑู ุดูุฆุง ุนู ููููู
ุง
โ
โ
ุฃุญู
ุฏ ุฎุงูุฏ ุชูููู (ุฃุณุทูุฑุฉ ุงูุจูุช)
โ
Nostalgia is an illness
for those who haven't realized
that today
is tomorrow's nostalgia.
โ
โ
Zeena Schreck
โ
The voice so filled with nostalgia that you could almost see the memories floating through the blue smoke, memories not only of music and joy and youth, but perhaps, of dreams. They listened to the music, each hearing it in his own way, feeling relaxed and a part of the music, a part of each other, and almost a part of the world.
โ
โ
Hubert Selby Jr. (Requiem for a Dream)
โ
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.
โ
โ
Ernest Hemingway
โ
You can go other places, all right - you can live on the other side of the world, but you can't ever leave home
โ
โ
Sue Monk Kidd (The Mermaid Chair)
โ
If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.
โ
โ
Pier Paolo Pasolini
โ
It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.
โ
โ
W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)
โ
Memory believes before knowing remembers.
[Light in August]
โ
โ
William Faulkner (Light in August)
โ
Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the truth, maybe I didn't want things to turn abstract, but I felt I should say it, because this was the moment to say it, because it suddenly dawned on me that this was why I had come, to tell him 'You are the only person I'd like to say goodbye to when I die, because only then will this thing I call my life make any sense. And if I should hear that you died, my life as I know it, the me who is speaking with you now, will cease to exist.
โ
โ
Andrรฉ Aciman (Call Me by Your Name)
โ
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.
โ
โ
John Corey Whaley (Noggin)
โ
When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.
The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.
โ
โ
Anne Morrow Lindbergh (Gift from the Sea)
โ
The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.
โ
โ
Milan Kundera (Immortality)
โ
The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with โ nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.
โ
โ
Rob Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time)
โ
Ajaibnya waktu, masa lalu yang menyakitkan lambat laun boleh berubah menjelma menjadi nostalgia romantik yang tidak ingin dilupakan.
โ
โ
Andrea Hirata (Sang Pemimpi)
โ
No loss is felt more keenly than the loss of what might have been. No nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed.
โ
โ
Rabih Alameddine (An Unnecessary Woman)
โ
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.
โ
โ
Ann Druyan
โ
We sat out there in silence for a minute and then Gus said, " I wish we had that swing set sometimes."
"The one from my backyard?"
"Yeah. My nostalgia is so extreme that I am capable of missing a swing my butt never actually touched."
"Nostalgia is a side effect of cancer," I told him.
"Nah, nostalgia is a side effect of dying," he answered. Above us, the wind blew and the branching shadows rearranged themselves on our skin. Gus squeezed my hand. "It is a good life, Hazel Grace.
โ
โ
John Green (The Fault in Our Stars)
โ
Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now.
โ
โ
Anne Morrow Lindbergh (Gift from the Sea)
โ
One is always at home in one's past...
โ
โ
Vladimir Nabokov (Speak, Memory)
โ
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.
โ
โ
R.A. Salvatore (Streams of Silver (Forgotten Realms: The Icewind Dale, #2; Legend of Drizzt, #5))
โ
ูุญุชุงุฌ ุง๏ปนูุณุงู ุฅูู ูุญุธุงุช ุงููุญุฏุฉ... ูุดุฐุจ ุฃุบุตุงู ู
ุงุถูู ุงููุงุจุณุฉ... ูุชููุฑ ูููุง ููู ูุงูุช ู ูู
ุง ุฒุงูุช.. ูุฌู
ุนูุง ูู ุงูููุงูุฉ ู ูุญุฑููุง ูู ู
ููุฏุฉ ุงููุณูุงู... ูุจูู ุฑู
ุงุฏูุง ุฐูุฑู ูู ุฃูุจูุฉ ุงูููุจ.. ูุงูุฑุงุฆุญุฉ ูุง ุชุฒูู !
โ
โ
ูุงูุฒ ุบุงุฒูุ Fayez Ghazi
โ
People leave traces of themselves where they feel most comfortable, most worthwhile.
โ
โ
Haruki Murakami (Dance Dance Dance)
โ
Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled; on the contrary; in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me; I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.
โ
โ
Milan Kundera (The Joke)
โ
Cรขลฃiva centimetri, cรขลฃiva ani, cรขteva mii de lei in plus, cรขteva cฤrลฃi citite รฎn plus, mฤ rog, lucruri de felul ฤsta despart oamenii...
โ
โ
Mircea Cฤrtฤrescu (Nostalgia)
โ
It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back.
โ
โ
Sue Monk Kidd (Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story)
โ
Captain Scultetus said, โSir, I am the commander of the Swakopmund Coast Guard. My name and rankย are Captain Oskar Scultetus! I respectfully beg you not to open fire upon my city!
โ
โ
Michael G. Kramer (His Forefathers and Mick)
โ
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.
โ
โ
Andrรฉ Aciman (Call Me by Your Name)
โ
Strange, how the best moments of our lives we scarcely notice except in looking back.
โ
โ
Joe Abercrombie (Red Country)
โ
Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.
โ
โ
Jean Baudrillard
โ
Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.
โ
โ
Amy Bloom (Away)
โ
The wind sings of our nostalgia
and the starry sky ignores our dreams.
Each snow flake is a tear that fails to trickle
Silence is full of the unspoken,
of deeds not performed,
of confessions to secret love,
and of wonders not expressed.
Our truth is hidden in our silence,
Yours and mine.
โ
โ
Margot Bickel
โ
When people talk about the good old days, I say to people, 'It's not the days that are old, it's you that's old.' I hate the good old days. What is important is that today is good.
โ
โ
Karl Lagerfeld
โ
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 Iโd ever had the feeling of missing someone I was still with.
โ
โ
Stuart Dybek (The Coast of Chicago: Stories)
โ
Jesus, Iโm not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what theyโre gonna do. Iโm just going to do it. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. ... You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how youโll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present
โ
โ
John Green (Looking for Alaska)
โ
I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don't recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that's all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.
โ
โ
Elena Ferrante (My Brilliant Friend (My Brilliant Friend, #1))
โ
I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.
โ
โ
W. Somerset Maugham (The Moon and Sixpence)
โ
What I notice is that every adult or child I give a new set of Crayolas to goes a little funny. The kids smile, get a glazed look on their faces, pour the crayons out, and just look at them for a while....The adults always get the most wonderful kind of sheepish smile on their faces--a mixture of delight and nostalgia and silliness. And they immediately start telling you about all their experiences with Crayolas.
โ
โ
Robert Fulghum (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten)
โ
Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '97:
Wear sunscreen.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.
Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 pm on some idle Tuesday.
Do one thing everyday that scares you.
Sing.
Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.
Floss.
Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself.
Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.
Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.
Stretch.
Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.
Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone.
Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.
Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own.
Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.
Read the directions, even if you don't follow them.
Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.
Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.
Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.
Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel.
Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders.
Respect your elders.
Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out.
Don't mess too much with your hair or by the time you're 40 it will look 85.
Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.
But trust me on the sunscreen.
โ
โ
Mary Schmich (Wear Sunscreen: A Primer for Real Life)
โ
The 'what should be' never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no 'what should be,' there is only what is.
โ
โ
Lenny Bruce
โ
You boys must always remember your roots, everything that makes you Puerto Rican. Donโt ever lose the stain of the plantain,โ Isa said.
โ
โ
Margarita Barresi (A Delicate Marriage)
โ
There's so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by natureโฆyes, that's it: just thinking about trees and their indifferent majesty and our love for them teaches us how ridiculous we are - vile parasites squirming on the surface of the earth - and at the same time how deserving of life we can be, when we can honor this beauty that owes us nothing.
โ
โ
Muriel Barbery (The Elegance of the Hedgehog)
โ
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.
โ
โ
Charles Bukowski (You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense)
โ
This is time for us. Memory. A nostalgia. The pain of absence. But it isn't absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain.
For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is in the end something good and even beautiful. Because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life.
โ
โ
Carlo Rovelli (L'ordine del tempo)
โ
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.
โ
โ
Margarita Barresi (A Delicate Marriage)
โ
The past is for learning from and letting go. You can't revisit it. It vanishes.
โ
โ
Adele Parks (Young Wives' Tales)
โ
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.
โ
โ
Joe Abercrombie (Best Served Cold)
โ
It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
โ
โ
Carson McCullers
โ
I know what it feels like, and it sucks, it really does, when you are up in the middle of the night thinking about the things that you've suddenly became aware of. The things you're missing out on right now, and all the people who are not close to you anymore, and all of the good times that will never happen again, and all the people who have meant the world to you who have forgotten about you forever, and you get this awful feeling that's kind of like a mix between loneliness and nostalgia.
โ
โ
Abraham M. Alghanem (Summer and Autumn)
โ
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.
โ
โ
Rick Riordan (The Mark of Athena (The Heroes of Olympus, #3))
โ
Use what you have, use what the world gives you. Use the first day of fall: bright flame before winter's deadness; harvest; orange, gold, amber; cool nights and the smell of fire. Our tree-lined streets are set ablaze, our kitchens filled with the smells of nostalgia: apples bubbling into sauce, roasting squash, cinnamon, nutmeg, cider, warmth itself. The leaves as they spark into wild color just before they die are the world's oldest performance art, and everything we see is celebrating one last violently hued hurrah before the black and white silence of winter.
โ
โ
Shauna Niequist (Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)
โ
In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of youโthe secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworthโs expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These thingsโthe beauty, the memory of our own pastโare good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
โ
โ
C.S. Lewis (The Weight of Glory)
โ
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.
โ
โ
Joan Didion (Blue Nights)
โ
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.
โ
โ
Chuck Klosterman (Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story)
โ
Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gambler and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen" and he would have meant the same thing.
โ
โ
John Steinbeck (Cannery Row (Cannery Row, #1))
โ
This is what I want. I want people to take care of me. I want them to force comfort upon me. I want the soft-pillow feeling that I associate with memories of being ill when I was younger, soft pillows and fresh linens and satin-edged blankets and hot chocolate. It's not so much the comfort itself as knowing there's someone who wants to take care of you.
โ
โ
Franny Billingsley (Chime)
โ
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.
โ
โ
Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go)
โ
On rainy afternoons, embroidering with a group of friends on the begonia porch, she would lose the thread of the conversation and a tear of nostalgia would salt her palate when she saw the strips of damp earth and the piles of mud that the earthworms had pushed up in the garden. Those secret tastes, defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible urge when she began to weep. She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food. She would put handfuls of earth in her pockets, and ate them in small bits without being seen, with a confused feeling of pleasure and rage, as she instructed her girl friends in the most difficult needlepoint and spoke about other men, who did not deserve the sacrifice of having one eat the whitewash on the walls because of them. The handfuls of earth made the only man who deserved that show of degradation less remote and more certain, as if the ground that he walked on with his fine patent leather boots in another part of the world were transmitting to her the weight and the temperature of his blood in a mineral savor that left a harsh aftertaste in her mouth and a sediment of peace in her heart.
โ
โ
Gabriel Garcรญa Mรกrquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)