Nostalgia Song Quotes

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I'd trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday.
Kris Kristofferson
The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — 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.
Rob Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time)
I get sentimental over the music of the ’90s. Deplorable, really. But I love it all. As far as I’m concerned the ’90s was the best era for music ever, even the stuff that I loathed at the time, even the stuff that gave me stomach cramps.
Rob Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time)
That’s why all those records from high school sound so good. It’s not that the songs were better—it’s that we were listening to them with our friends, drunk for the first time on liqueurs, touching sweaty palms, staring for hours at a poster on the wall, not grossed out by carpet or dirt or crumpled, oily bedsheets. These songs and albums were the best ones because of how huge adolescence felt then, and how nostalgia recasts it now.
Carrie Brownstein (Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir)
Sometimes you’re 23 and standing in the kitchen of your house making breakfast and brewing coffee and listening to music that for some reason is really getting to your heart. You’re just standing there thinking about going to work and picking up your dry cleaning. And also more exciting things like books you’re reading and trips you plan on taking and relationships that are springing into existence. Or fading from your memory, which is far less exciting. And suddenly you just don’t feel at home in your skin or in your house and you just want home but “Mom’s” probably wouldn’t feel like home anymore either. There used to be the comfort of a number in your phone and ears that listened every day and arms that were never for anyone else. But just to calm you down when you started feeling trapped in a five-minute period where nostalgia is too much and thoughts of this person you are feel foreign. When you realize that you’ll never be this young again but this is the first time you’ve ever been this old. When you can’t remember how you got from sixteen to here and all the same feel like sixteen is just as much of a stranger to you now. The song is over. The coffee’s done. You’re going to breath in and out. You’re going to be fine in about five minutes.
Kalyn Roseanne Livernois (High Wire Darlings)
what it is is the memory of a dance a song you heard long ago to hear it is to be young again and for once for once you are happy
Julio Alexi Genao
But for me, if we're talking about romance, cassettes wipe the floor with MP3s. This has nothing to do with superstition, or nostalgia. MP3s buzz straight to your brain. That's part of what I love about them. But the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection between two sloppy human bodies. The cassette is full of tape hiss and room tone; it's full of wasted space, unnecessary noise. Compared to the go-go-go rhythm of an MP3, mix tapes are hopelessly inefficient. You go back to a cassette the way a detective sits and pours drinks for the elderly motel clerk who tells stories about the old days--you know you might be somewhat bored, but there might be a clue in there somewhere. And if there isn't, what the hell? It's not a bad time. You know you will waste time. You plan on it.
Rob Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time)
When the middle classes get passionate about politics, they're arguing about their treats—their tax breaks and their investments. When the poor get passionate about politics, they're fighting for their lives. Politics will always mean more to the poor. Always. That's why we strike and march, and despair when our young say they won't vote. That's why the poor are seen as more vital, more animalistic. No classical music for us—no walking around National Trust properties or buying reclaimed flooring. We don't have nostalgia. We don't do yesterday. We can't bear it. We don't want to be reminded of our past, because it was awful: dying in means, and slums, without literacy, or the vote. Without dignity. It was all so desperate then. That's why the present and the future is for the poor—that's the place in time for us: surviving now, hoping for better later. We live now—for our instant, hot, fast treats, to pep us up: sugar, a cigarette, a new fast song on the radio. You must never, never forget when you talk to someone poor, that it takes ten times the effort to get anywhere from a bad post code. It's a miracle when someone from a bad post code gets anywhere, son. A miracle they do anything at all.
Caitlin Moran (How to Build a Girl (How to Build a Girl, #1))
I really appreciated having the tape-and that song-back again. Even then, it was mainly a nostalgia thing, and today, if I happen to get the tape out and look at it, it brings back memories of that afternoon in Norfolk every bit as much as it does our Hailsham days.
Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go)
She considered what had made Denmark home to her anyway. Was it the sense of familiarity? That wherever she went there were echoes of a hundred memories she could pluck from her thoughts?
Sage Steadman (Upon Destiny's Song)
Once upon a time we all walked on the golden road. It was a fair highway, through the Land of Lost Delight; shadow and sunshine were blessedly mingled, and every turn and dip revealed a fresh charm and a new loveliness to eager hearts and unspoiled eyes. On that road we heard the song of morning stars; we drank in fragrances aerial and sweet as a May mist; we were rich in gossamer fancies and iris hopes; our hearts sought and found the boon of dreams; the years waited beyond and they were very fair; life was a rose-lipped comrade with purple flowers dripping from her fingers. We may long have left the golden road behind, but its memories are the dearest of our eternal possessions; and those who cherish them as such may haply find a pleasure in the pages of this book, whose people are pilgrims on the golden road of youth.
L.M. Montgomery (The Golden Road (The Story Girl, #2))
In a room as big as loneliness my heart which is as big as love looks at the simple pretexts of its happiness at the beautiful decay of flowers in the vase at the saplings you planted in our garden and the song of canaries which sing to the size of a window. Ah…this is my lot this is my lot my lot is a sky that is taken away at the drop of a curtain my lot is going down a flight of disused stairs to regain something amid putrefaction and nostalgia my lot is a sad promenade in the garden of memories and dying in the grief of a voice which tells me I love your hands.
Forugh Farrokhzad
This song always kills me, I said. She sighed, and then gave up. Why? Oh, I don't know. It makes me feel nostalgia for a time I never even knew. I wasn't even alive. That's what I do to you too, she said, I'll just bet. I was what everything I loved did to me.
Michael Chabon (The Mysteries of Pittsburgh)
….For instance, I hated Pearl Jam at the time. I thought they were pompous blowhards. Now, whenever a Pearl Jam song comes on the car radio, I find myself pounding my fist on the dashboard, screaming, “Pearl JAM! Pearl JAM! Now this is rock and roll! Jeremy’s SPO-ken! But he’s still al-LIIIIIVE!
Rob Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time)
NW" is full of split selves, people alienated from the very things they thought defined them. Their nostalgia -- for old movies, old songs, buses they don't ride anymore -- is less a salve than a form of pain.
Christian Lorentzen
I wish I hadn't met you in the rain: it comes every winter. I wish you hadn't told me your favorite wine: I've become a drinker. I wish I never showed you my hidden birthmark: It looks back at me at night asking where you are. I wish I hadn't read you my journal, all the pages praising you, It's corrupted now that I can't tell if I write for me or you. I wish I hadn't told you my daily routine: it's not mine anymore. I can't enjoy 11:11, my favorite song, a birthday cake, or a concert tour. I'm not afraid of the future, it's the past that takes a while.
Kristian Ventura (Can I Tell You Something?)
Look around you, Ethan." I said. "The end of the world. Is this the reward you want? Do you really want everything destroyed - the good with the bad? Everything?" " There is no throne to Nemesis, " Ethan muttered. "No throne to my mother." "You said your mom is the goddess of balance," I reminded him. "The minor gods deserve better, Ethan, but total destruction isn't balance. Kronos doesn't build. He only destroys." Ethan looked at the sizzling throne of Hephaestus. Grover's music kept playing, and Ethan swayed to it, as if the song was filling him with nostalgia - a wish to see a beautiful day, to be anywhere but here. His good eye blinked. Then he charged...but not at me. While Kronos was still on his knees, Ethan brought his sword down on the Titan lord's neck. It should have killed him instantly, but the blade shattered. Ethan fell back, grasping his stomach. A shard of his own blade had ricocheted and pierced his armor. Kronos rose unsteadily, towering over his servant. "Treason," he snarled. Grover's music kept playing, and grass grew around Ethan's body. Ethan stared at me, his face tight with pain. "Deserve better, " he gasped. "If they just...had thrones-" Kronos stomped his foot, and the floor ruptured around Ethan Nakamura. The son of Nemesis fell through a fissure that went straight through the heart of the mountain - straight into open air. "So much for him." Kronos picked up his sword. "And now for the rest of you.
Rick Riordan (The Last Olympian (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #5))
Michael [Hutchence] is hands down one of the greatest frontmen in music. The style, the voice—all of it. Any way that I was ever influenced by him really comes down to small, pale imitations compared to the real thing. There is a fearlessness about him. Watching him at Wembley Stadium with 70,000 people, he looks as comfortable as if he were in his own living room.
Lori Majewski (Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s)
Nostalgia was originally diagnosed as a sickness. In the 1600s, the word was coined to describe an acute physical pain that Swiss soldiers experienced when they were in the lowlands of Italy and yearning for the alpine vistas of home. Nostalgia and its symptoms (fainting, high fever, and indigestion) were so deadly that playing a particular Swiss milking song was punishable by death.
Dolly Alderton (Everything I Know About Love: A Memoir)
Music anchors us to a time and place, rooted with feelings, and is invisible liquid nostalgia that flows through our ears directly into our hearts (where our memories are stored). What song was playing when you first thought about stealing a duck out of a park pond?
Jarod Kintz (Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.)
Graceful. Lean. Coordinated as she whirls, though how she knows what dancing is, [her grandfather] could never guess. The song plays on. He lets it go too long. The antenna is still up, probably dimly visible against the sky, the whole attic might as well shine like a beacon. But in the candlelight, in the sweet rush of a concerto, Marie-Laure bites her lower lip, and her face gives off a secondary glow, reminding him of the marshes beyond the town walls, in those winter dusks when the sun has set but isn't fully swallowed, and big patches of red pools of light burn - places he used to go with his brother, in what seems like lifetimes ago.
Anthony Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See)
Toulouse is to lose. Good on us,
 That one never lied And said it’s still alive. A full life is a series Of incompletions. Whole with holes. Entirely fragmented. Carrying one-days, Sentences, Old lovers, And looks. Absolutes turn men and women 
Into machines that need 
Numbers to work.
 But people were never meant to work Just to live.
Kristian Ventura (The Goodbye Song)
He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the buffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairie, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story. This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for a rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed, - these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces, - and this would always be his.
Willa Cather (A Lost Lady)
A million love songs later, we still adore the sound of nostalgia.
Eve Barlow
But the strains of the doleful song stirred such powerful nostalgia for lost loves and for things lost over the course of one's life...
André Aciman (Call Me By Your Name (Call Me By Your Name, #1))
While it happened, 
I could see the rest of my life But now it’s over and that’s life. Moments deserve their peace. What can I say? 
It’s a different day.
Kristian Ventura (The Goodbye Song)
Hour of nostalgia, hour of happiness, hour of solitude, hour that is mine from among them all! Hunting horn through which the wind passes singing. Such a passion of weeping tied to my body.
Pablo Neruda (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair)
Look around you, Ethan." I said. "The end of the world. Is this the reward you want? Do you really want everything destroyed - the good with the bad? Everything?" "There is no throne to Nemesis, " Ethan muttered. "No throne to my mother." "You said your mom is the goddess of balance," I reminded him. "The minor gods deserve better, Ethan, but total destruction isn't balance. Kronos doesn't build. He only destroys." Ethan looked at the sizzling throne of Hephaestus. Grover's music kept playing, and Ethan swayed to it, as if the song was filling him with nostalgia - a wish to see a beautiful day, to be anywhere but here. His good eye blinked. Then he charged...but not at me. While Kronos was still on his knees, Ethan brought his sword down on the Titan lord's neck. It should have killed him instantly, but the blade shattered. Ethan fell back, grasping his stomach. A shard of his own blade had ricocheted and pierced his armor. Kronos rose unsteadily, towering over his servant. "Treason," he snarled. Grover's music kept playing, and grass grew around Ethan's body. Ethan stared at me, his face tight with pain. "Deserve better, " he gasped. "If they just...had thrones-" Kronos stomped his foot, and the floor ruptured around Ethan Nakamura. The son of Nemesis fell through a fissure that went straight through the heart of the mountain - straight into open air. "So much for him." Kronos picked up his sword. "And now for the rest of you.
Rick Riordan (The Last Olympian (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #5))
The songs are full of nostalgia, which is to say they are full of mourning; one remembers that which came before, often with a fond sadness, a want to return, despite knowing to return to a memory is to morph it, to warp it. Every time you remember something, the memory weakens, as you’re remembering the last recollection, rather than the memory itself. Nothing can remain intact. Still, it does not stop you wanting, does not stop you longing.
Caleb Azumah Nelson (Open Water)
Mr. Cuddleswithbubbles just asked me if I could make a soapy duck soup that’s scented like a Boxcar Willie song, to capture that classic 1991 Branson nostalgia. I’ll try, but I’m not sure if I have that much cactus extract.
Jarod Kintz (Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.)
This is the part of the country that invokes terrible nostalgia, a morbid and phlegm-induced retrospective of parties, clubs, drugs, shows, people, and is the goiter of my Boston days. I wouldn't have a clue as to who I'd ever care to see in this town, though I've done time here. If it weren't for Daughters and company, I'd feel like a compete tourist in a ghostly, plot-less town...pulling hoods up and heads around, opposite directions, if I ever saw someone I thought I might have known. Young people feeling really cool in bathrooms, dancing to the same songs in the same clubs, with the same dropout students, artists, thugs, bullies, jocks, all game in the search for one's self and sex.
Wesley Eisold
The main thing that youth has going for it is porpoise-tight skin. Raw, wide-eyed newness is meaningless. Nostalgia for knowing nothing is asinine; you can’t recapture it and you don’t want to relive it. Better to sing a song of experience with your burning tiger’s heart.
Chelsea G. Summers (A Certain Hunger)
At his age, it can be overwhelming and painful to harbor a thought accompanied by too much nostalgia. Not that he wanted to. Mabel, in her final years, had stopped listening to music. The songs of her teenage years brought her back to people and feelings of that time - people she could never see again and sensations that were no longer coming. It was too much for her. There are people who can manage such things. There are those of us who can no longer walk, but can close our eyes and remember a summer hike through a field, or the feeling of cool grass beneath our feet, and smile. Who still have the courage to embrace the past, and give it life and a voice in the present. But Mabel was not one of those people. Maybe she lacked that very form of courage. Or maybe her humanity was so complete, so expansive, that she would be crushed by her capacity to imagine the love that was gone.
Derek B. Miller (Norwegian by Night (Sheldon Horowitz #2))
There's one big difference between the poor and the rich,' Kite says, taking a drag from his cigarette. We are in a pub, at lunch-time. John Kite is always, unless stated otherwise, smoking a fag, in a pub, at lunch-time. 'The rich aren't evil, as so many of my brothers would tell you. I've known rich people -- I have played on their yachts -- and they are not unkind, or malign, and they do not hate the poor, as many would tell you. And they are not stupid -- or at least, not any more than the poor are. Much as I find amusing the idea of a ruling class of honking toffs, unable to put their socks on without Nanny helping them, it is not true. They build banks, and broker deals, and formulate policy, all with perfect competency. 'No -- the big difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich are blithe. They believe nothing can ever really be so bad, They are born with the lovely, velvety coating of blitheness -- like lanugo, on a baby -- and it is never rubbed off by a bill that can't be paid; a child that can't be educated; a home that must be left for a hostel, when the rent becomes too much. 'Their lives are the same for generations. There is no social upheaval that will really affect them. If you're comfortably middle-class, what's the worst a government policy could do? Ever? Tax you at 90 per cent and leave your bins, unemptied, on the pavement. But you and everyone you know will continue to drink wine -- but maybe cheaper -- go on holiday -- but somewhere nearer -- and pay off your mortgage -- although maybe later. 'Consider, now, then, the poor. What's the worst a government policy can do to them? It can cancel their operation, with no recourse to private care. It can run down their school -- with no escape route to a prep. It can have you out of your house and into a B&B by the end of the year. When the middle-classes get passionate about politics, they're arguing about their treats -- their tax breaks and their investments. When the poor get passionate about politics, they're fighting for their lives. 'Politics will always mean more to the poor. Always. That's why we strike and march, and despair when our young say they won't vote. That's why the poor are seen as more vital, and animalistic. No classical music for us -- no walking around National Trust properties, or buying reclaimed flooring. We don't have nostalgia. We don't do yesterday. We can't bear it. We don't want to be reminded of our past, because it was awful; dying in mines, and slums, without literacy, or the vote. Without dignity. It was all so desperate, then. That's why the present and the future is for the poor -- that's the place in time for us: surviving now, hoping for better, later. We live now -- for our instant, hot, fast treats, to prep us up: sugar, a cigarette, a new fast song on the radio. 'You must never, never forget, when you talk to someone poor, that it takes ten times the effort to get anywhere from a bad postcode, It's a miracle when someone from a bad postcode gets anywhere, son. A miracle they do anything at all.
Caitlin Moran (How to Build a Girl (How to Build a Girl, #1))
I could tell him I love him, but love seems too cliché, too overdone. I feel love, but I also feel jokes and front porch fights, pinky promises and friendship bracelets. I feel rolling my eyes when he made fun of my favorite songs, yelling at him when he paired up with Ashley Olson on our seventh-grade field day. I feel love, but I also feel our history, years and years of choosing him, the good and bad, highs and lows. Choosing to love. Not despite the flaws. Because of them. Because the mistakes prove we were together long enough to make them. Because we knew each other at our worst and even then, no one else compared.
Caroline George (The Summer We Forgot)
my best friend tell me that to her the concert wasn’t about the band—it was about us, it was about the fact that we were there together, that the music itself was secondary to our world, merely something that colored it, spoke to it. That’s why all those records from high school sound so good. It’s not that the songs were better—it’s that we were listening to them with our friends, drunk for the first time on liqueurs, touching sweaty palms, staring for hours at a poster on the wall, not grossed out by carpet or dirt or crumpled, oily bedsheets. These songs and albums were the best ones because of how huge adolescence felt then, and how nostalgia recasts it now.
Carrie Brownstein (Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir)
You feel like a leaf at the mercy of the wind, don’t you?” he finally said, staring at me. That was exactly the way I felt. He seemed to empathize with me. He said that my mood reminded him of a song and began to sing in a low tone; his singing voice was very pleasing and the lyrics carried me away: “I’m so far away from the sky where I was born. Immense nostalgia invades my thoughts. Now that I am so alone and sad like a leaf in the wind, sometimes I want to weep, sometimes I want to laugh with longing.” (Que lejos estoy del cielo donde he nacido. Immensa nostalgia invade mi pensamiento. Ahora que estoy tan solo y triste cual hoja al viento, quisiera llorar, quisiera reir de sentimiento.) We did not speak for a long while. He finally broke the silence. “Since the day you were born, one way or another, someone has been doing something to you,” he said. “That’s correct,” I said. “And they have been doing something to you against your will.” “True.” “And by now you’re helpless, like a leaf in the wind.” “That’s correct. That’s the way it is.” I said that the circumstances of my life had sometimes been devastating. He listened attentively but I could not figure out whether he was just being agreeable or genuinely concerned until I noticed that he was trying to hide a smile. “No matter how much you like to feel sorry for yourself, you have to change that,” he said in a soft tone. “It doesn’t jibe with the life of a warrior.
Carlos Castaneda (Journey To Ixtlan)
Politics will always mean more to the poor. Always. That's why we strike and march, and despair when our young say they won't vote. That's why the poor are seen as more vital, and animalistic. No classical music for us - no walking around National Trust properties or buying reclaimed flooring. We don't have nostalgia. We don't do yesterday. We can't bear it. We don't want to be reminded of our past, because it was awful: dying in mines and slums without literacy or the vote. Without dignity. It was all so desperate then. That's why the present and the future is for the poor - that's the place in time for us: surviving now, hoping for better later. We live now - for our own instant hot, fast treats, to pep us up: sugar, a cigarette, a new fast song on the radio.
Caitlin Moran
I’ve long had reservations about the emancipatory rhetoric of past eras, especially the kind that treats liberation as a one-time event or event horizon. Nostalgia for prior notions of liberation—many of which depend heavily upon mythologies of revelation, violent upheaval, revolutionary machismo, and teleological progress—often strikes me as not useful or worse in the face of certain present challenges, such as global warming.
Maggie Nelson (On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint)
The whiff of ocean on the southern breeze and the smell of burning asphalt brought back memories of summers past. It had seemed as though those sweet dreams of summer would last forever: the warmth of a girl’s skin, an old rock ‘n’ roll song, freshly washed button-down shirt, the odor of cigarette smoke in a pool changing room, a fleeting premonition. Then one summer (when had it been?) the dreams had vanished, never to return.
Haruki Murakami
It would be an account of love and duty, not just anger and hatred, and it would be filled with dreams, and the memory of having once looked to the future, and an eagerness to dream again. It would be boring, because you simply had to be there. It would be poetry and not history. ...the deep ambivalence you once felt toward a song that now devastated you...the look when someone recognizes you. I'm going to write about all this one day, I told her, and she smiled at me.
Hua Hsu (Stay True)
I leaned my head back against the brick. “I think I’d be a gardener in a woods just for children, and when they came by I’d sit and listen to their wonderings. And the ocean would be nearby. I’d live in a little house on the shore. At dawn I’d strip off all my clothes and swim. At night I’d sing a song about the way life used to be. It would be such a sad song it would make the grownups nod and the children cry. But I’d sing it every night so that no one would ever confuse nostalgia with wanting to return.
Leslie Feinberg
From the stage Ben catches my eye. "This is for them, Taylor," he calls out as they begin to play. It's a song by the Waterboys and, like each time I hear the music played by the boy in the tree in my dreams, I experience a bittersweet sense of nostalgia I have no right to own. When it's time for Ben to play his solo–his eyes closed, his mind anywhere but here, his fingers so taut and precise that it almost looks painful–my eyes well with tears. Because you know from the look on Ben's face that he's somewhere you want to be. Somewhere the five would be each time they were together.
Melina Marchetta (On the Jellicoe Road)
I wrote this next song a while ago to a great American singer who died several years ago. I used to bumb into her from time to time at hotel in New York where a lot of musicians used to come. A lot of those musicians are gone. They say the era is over. They say these are now the times of the conservative, the stable, the order. Perhaps that's true. She certainly stood for something that was beyond order and beyond chaos, beyond the radical and beyond the conservative, which is what every great singer embodies. Something that is not an argument, not a philosophy. Anyway, I wrote this song for her a long time ago.
Leonard Cohen
Take what you have of what remains, take the colors of what is still left, for this is the flame that will set your soul ablaze before that moment comes when the leaf trembles shuddering in its last joy, the robin cries knowing it is the last song. Sing, Sing, O Sojourner, no season is meant to stay. The deeps are filled with a bitter sweet nostalgia... the cinnamon, nutmeg, cider roast smell, the earth sparkling, feasting on the colors, the grounds merry making as the leaves softly play, for this is the life's sacred performance art, as the earth is playing the grand finale before it slips in the winter's white silence....
Jayita Bhattacharjee
I couldn't help feeling a strange nostalgia for the simpler way of life in Songnam-ri. I don't know how else to explain it, but all these new experiences seemed deeply familiar. Up in the mountains, surrounded by nature, I felt closer to my real self than at any time I have known. In some ways it was like living in ancient Chosun, the long-ago Korean kingdom I had heard about from my little grandmother in Kowon. I think she had the same yearning for a place neither of us had known, that existed only in old songs and dreams. The year I spent in the country gave me a safe place to rest and heal. But it was not my fate to stay there forever.
Yeonmi Park (In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom)
But the strains of the doleful song stirred such powerful nostalgia for lost loves and for things lost over the course of one's life and for lives, like my grandfather's, that had come long before mine that I was suddenly taken back to a poor, disconsolate universe of simple folk like Mafalda's ancestors, fretting and scurrying in the tiny vicoli of an old Naples whose memory I wanted to share word for word with Oliver now, as if he too, like Mafalda and Manfredi and Anchise and me, were a fellow southerner whom I'd met in a foreign port city and who'd instantly understand why the sound of this old song, like an ancient prayer for the dead in the deadest of languages, could bring tears even in those who couldn't understand a syllable.
André Aciman (Call Me by Your Name)
Do not harden yourself to what has affected you so deeply in life. This is the important part. Be thankful for it. Be thankful for the songs you hear that make your soul bubble over with nostalgia. Be thankful for the morning light and how it hits that one spot on your bed that holds the ghosted memory of someone who was once your favorite thing. Be thankful for your heart and how at one point, you could feel it beating against your rib cage for ten days straight because your bones were blushing at the thought of someone’s hand within yours. Let these moments seek refuge in your soul. Let them wash over you. Let them remind you that at one point, you embraced what it meant to love without abandon. Let them remind you that at one point, you tried for something.
Bianca Sparacino (The Strength In Our Scars)
No. It’s like that old dilemma of trying to choose between The Beatles and The Stones. It can’t be done.” Her blunt nose wrinkles, and I have the overwhelming urge to kiss it. “Of course it can be done,” she says, oblivious to my thoughts. “The Beatles for joy or nostalgia. The Stones for drinking or sex.” At the word sex my cock jumps as if to remind me that I’ve been ignoring him and he is not amused. I tilt my hips toward the bed and press my irritable cock to the mattress. The randy bastard jerks in protest. I empathize with my needy willy. Truly. But some things are worth more. Keep telling yourself that, mate. “Why not The Beatles for sex?” I can’t help asking. Mistake. Turning any conversation towards sex is playing with fire. But apparently I like the sweet pain of being slowly burned. Sophie shrugs, sending the white sheet farther down the curve of her shoulder. “Name one Beatles song that’s sexier than a Stones’ song.
Kristen Callihan (Managed (VIP, #2))
We are hardwired to hear and make music. Yes, we will sigh with pleasure when we hear a favorite theme played by an orchestra, and who hasn’t felt a stab of nostalgia, or even brushed away a tear, when hearing a song reminiscent of youth or a lost love? However, such exquisite moments notwithstanding, the musical experience represents something far deeper. Broadly defined, music is sound in time. Sound is nothing less than our perception of the vibrations, the movement, of the universe around us. Music is an intensification, a crystallization, a celebration, a glorification, of that movement and those vibrations. Pretty heady stuff. Far beyond spoken language—which, with its sounds in time, might rightly be considered a low-end sort of music—music is a universal language; one need not speak Ashanti in order to groove to West African drumming; or German in order to be emotionally flayed by Beethoven; or English to totally freak when listening to Bruce Springsteen. Say it with flowers? Nah. If you really want to get your expressive point across, say it with music. No human activity
Robert Greenberg (How to Listen to Great Music: A Guide to Its History, Culture, and Heart (The Great Courses))
Tonight, an old ache awakens within me, a yearning that threads through my veins like a distant song. I am consumed by a passion that seizes every corner of my soul, an urgent fire that longs to be stoked by your touch. The thought of you ignites a blaze that refuses to be contained, a hunger for the nights we could share, where our bodies speak the language of longing, and every moment is a tender exploration of desire. I feel us entwined already, as if our souls have danced together before. Without you, I wander in a sea of echoes, lost in the silent spaces where your presence should be. You are not just a lover; you are the very pulse of my heart. In your embrace, I find a completeness that words cannot capture, a connection that feels ancient and profound— a bond that burns fiercely, beautifully, even as it breaks my heart. Please, let us come together soon. I am aching with a fervor that only you can soothe, burning with a passion that is both a comfort and a torment, an insatiable need to be near you, to lose myself in the warmth of our union. All I desire is to be with you, to surrender to the depth of our shared longing, for you are the world to me, the fire that lights my darkest nights.
Anna Curto
In 1964 the fear & loathing of Barry Goldwater was startling. Martin Luther King, Jr., detected “dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign.” Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress, warned that “a Jewish vote for Goldwater is a vote for Jewish suicide.” And George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, saw power falling into “the hands of union-hating extremists, racial bigots, woolly-minded seekers after visions of times long past.” On Election Day Goldwater suffered a devastating defeat, winning only 41 electoral votes. It was the judgment of the establishment that Goldwater’s critique of American liberalism had been given its final exposure on the national political scene. Conservatives could now go back to their little lairs and sing to themselves their songs of nostalgia and fancy, and maybe gather together every few years to hold testimonial dinners in honor of Barry Goldwater, repatriated by Lyndon Johnson to the parched earth of Phoenix, where dwell only millionaires seeking dry air to breathe and the Indians Barry Goldwater could now resume photographing. But then of course 16 years later the world was made to stand on its head when Ronald Reagan was swept into office on a platform indistinguishable from what Barry had been preaching. During
William F. Buckley Jr. (A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century)
Write about an empty birdcage" Write about an empty birdcage. As in: write about your ribcage after robbery. Use negative space to wind a song from the place on the dresser where a music box isn’t. Write about the corners where the two of you used to meet. Draw the intersections, arrow to the sidewalk where her shoes aren’t near yours. Write about an empty birdcage. As in: write about a hinged-open jaw that is neither sigh nor scream. Use this to signify EXIT. Make sure to describe the teeth, the glint of metal deep down in the molars, the smell of breath after lack of water. Make sure to draw this mouth a thirsty and human portrait of what it means to be used up. Write about voice by writing about how it feels when it’s painful to swallow. If you must put noise in the scene make it the sound of bird wings flapping in a cardboard box. Show us an empty cage and give us the sound of confinement. Take hope and fold it small as seed, then suck on it. Slow and selfish. Write about an empty birdcage. Birdcage can read: building, structure, abandoned or adorned. As in: loop and tighten a vine of nostalgia around the room you currently brick yourself into. Recreate the sweet of jasmine, but mortar the door so it will not seep through. Write about an empty birdcage. Replay us the scene. As in: she presses her pale cheek against the window, as he turns his pinstriped back, slow and final. Again. She presses her pale cheek against the window, and he turns his pinstriped back, slow and final. Again. She presses her pale cheek against the window, as he turns his pinstriped back, slow and final. Again. She presses her her pale cheek against the window, as he turns his pinstriped back, slow and final. Write about an empty birdcage. Write about the hinges. Describe them as dry knuckles. Write how I became a moan.
Elaina M. Ellis (Write About an Empty Birdcage)
Watching, the ancient bull whale was swept up in memories of his own birthing. His mother had been savaged by sharks three months later; crying over her in the shallows of Hawaiki, he had been succoured by the golden human who became his master. The human had heard the young whale’s distress and had come into the sea, playing a flute. The sound was plangent and sad as he tried to communicate his oneness with the young whale’s mourning. Quite without the musician knowing it, the melodic patterns of the flute’s phrases imitated the whalesong of comfort. The young whale drew nearer to the human, who cradled him and pressed noses with the orphan in greeting. When the herd travelled onward, the young whale remained and grew under the tutelage of his master. The bull whale had become handsome and virile, and he had loved his master. In the early days his master would play the flute and the whale would come to the call. Even in his lumbering years of age the whale would remember his adolescence and his master; at such moments he would send long, undulating songs of mourning through the lambent water. The elderly females would swim to him hastily, for they loved him, and gently in the dappled warmth they would minister to him. In a welter of sonics, the ancient bull whale would communicate his nostalgia. And then, in the echoing water, he would hear his master’s flute. Straight away the whale would cease his feeding and try to leap out of the sea, as he used to when he was younger and able to speed toward his master. As the years had burgeoned the happiness of those days was like a siren call to the ancient bull whale. But his elderly females were fearful; for them, that rhapsody of adolescence, that song of the flute, seemed only to signify that their leader was turning his thoughts to the dangerous islands to the south-west.
Witi Ihimaera (The Whale Rider)
At Prim’s side was a woman with a politician’s face (supercilious, sanctimonious, vacuous, terrified, smarmy, disingenuous, small-minded, vengeful, coldhearted, opportunistic, petty, deceitful, evidence-ignoring, bullying, arrogant, smug, obnoxious, contemptuous, ignorant, reactionary, condescending, patronizing, blinkered, vacillating, corrupt, morally bankrupt, blackmailing, blackmailable, dodgy, wavering, backstabbing, bought, sold, stinking rich, unqualified, sleazy, teeth-capped, kneecapping, corporate-owned, hate-mongering, fear-mongering, button-pushing, deflecting, evading, brazening, hit-song-stealing, nostalgia-worshipping, distorting, no-tax-returning, tax-evading, offshore-holding, shady-business-partnering, election-stealing, arms-dealing, collateral-damage signing-offing, hypocritically family-value bleating but sexually deviant-ing, honest-forthright-honorable—a paragon-of-integrity [lying], spiteful, unreliable, Teflon-coated, Saran-wrapped, white-breaded, xenophobic, cynical, uncomprehending of irony-ing, witless, thin-skinned, insecure, unfulfilled, blindly ambitious, power-hungry, sadistic, self-righteous, incapable of contemplation-ing, prevaricating, privileged, pampered, Ivy League–educated [in something useless like political science, economics, or law], pompous, ego-centered, centered, narcissistic, shallow, bullshitting, manipulative, backtracking, quote-denying, what-climate-changing?, alternate-truth-ing, prejudice-feeding, hate-inciting, racketeering, blame-shifting, warmongering, autocratic, megalomaniacal, possibly sociopathic, blathering, self-serving, unreliable, cliquey, cagey, crafty, cunning, daft, dull, ethically destitute, irredeemable, oil-burning, fracking [but NIMBY], self-pay-raising, self-congratulating, self-aggrandizing, but all that was just first impressions so who can say?).
Steven Erikson (Willful Child: The Search for Spark (Willful Child, 3))
Sometimes it seems like he just wants to punish someone, anyone, for a long list of grievances that he has never made clear, which you can never ask about because he keeps his emotions so guarded that any question would be interpreted as assault. I wonder if dragging us to this village and the nearby town wear he spent his childhood is a way of sinking us all into his own personal hell so that we can see how this strange combination of poverty and opportunity, these broken and muddy roads, these crumbling houses, these overburdened men and women walking slowly in these streets singing praise songs to keep themselves going, created the strange combination of love and anger and pride and fear that is my father. He always sat in the passenger seat while we drove around the village so he could fully view what he sometimes called a world of wasted opportunity. With OJ or my mother in the car, he pointed out all the things he would make right if only he had the power. With me now, he says nothing. Occasionally he turns to look at me with the same expression that occupies his face when he has to solve a problem at the office. I sink down in my seat and wish that my mother had come.
Uzodinma Iweala (Speak No Evil)
That's why all those records from high school sound so good. It's not that the songs were better--it's that we were listening to them with our friends, drunk for the first time on liqueurs, touching sweaty palms, staring for hours at a poster on the wall, not grossed out by carpet or dirt or crumpled oily bedsheets. These songs and albums were the best ones because of how huge adolescence felt then, and how nostalgia recasts it now.
Carrie Brownstein (Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl)
Love is a song played on repeat...
Tamatha Cain
Eventually, he felt an overwhelming urge to meld his voice with the notes, and he began to play his ballad for the wind. Jack sang his verses, his fingers strumming with confidence. He sang to the southern wind with its promise of strength in battle. He sang to the western wind with its promise of healing. He sang to the northern wind with its promise of vindication. The notes rose and fell, undulating like the hills far beneath him. But while the wind carried his music and his voice, the folk of the air didn’t answer. What if they refuse to come? Jack wondered, with a pulse of worry. From the corner of his eye, he watched as Adaira rose to her feet. The wind seemed to be waiting for her to move. To stand and meet it. She stood planted on the rock as Jack continued to play, shielded by Orenna’s essence. Twice, he had played for the spirits and had nearly forgotten he was a man, that he was not a part of them. But this time he held firmly to himself as he watched the folk answer. The southern wind manifested first. They arrived with a sigh and formed themselves from the gust, individualizing into men and women with hair like fire—red and amber with a trace of blue. Great feathered wings bloomed from their backs like those of a bird, and each beat of their pinions emitted a wash of warmth and longing. Jack could taste the nostalgia they offered; he drank it like a bittersweet wine, like the memories of a summer long ago. The east wind was the next to arrive. They manifested in a flurry of leaves, their hair like molten gold. Their wings were fashioned like those of a bat, long and pronged and the shade of dusk. They carried the fragrance of rain in their wings. The west wind spun themselves out of whispers, with hair the shade of midnight, long and jeweled with stars. Their wings were like those of a moth, patterned with moons, beating softly and evoking both beauty and dread as Jack beheld them. The air shimmered at their edges like a dream, as if they might melt at any moment, and their skin smelled of smoke and cloves as they hovered in place, unable to depart as Jack’s music captivated them. Half of the spirits watched him, entranced by his ballad. But half of them watched Adaira, their eyes wide and brimming with light. “It’s her,” some of them whispered. Jack missed a note. He quickly regained his place, pushing his concern aside. It felt like his nails were creating sparks on the brass strings. He sang the verse for the northern wind again. The sky darkened. Thunder rumbled in the distance as the north reluctantly answered Jack’s summoning. The air plunged cold and bitter as the strongest of the winds manifested from wisps of clouds and stinging gales. It answered the music, fragmenting into men and women with flaxen hair, dressed in leather and links of silver webs. Their wings were translucent and veined, reminiscent of a dragonfly’s, boasting every color found beneath the sun. They came reluctantly, defiantly. Their eyes bore into him like needles. Jack was alarmed by their reaction to him. Some of them hissed through their sharp teeth, while others cowered as if awaiting a death blow. His ballad came to its end, and the absence of his voice and music sharpened the terror of the moment. Adaira continued to stand before an audience of manifested spirits, and Jack was stunned by the sight of them. To know that they had rushed alongside him as he walked the east. That he had felt their fingers in his hair, felt them kiss his mouth and steal words from his lips, carrying his voice in their hands. And his music had just summoned them. His voice and song now held them captive, beholden to him. He studied the horde. Some of the spirits looked amused, others shocked. Some were afraid, and some were angry.
Rebecca Ross (A River Enchanted (Elements of Cadence, #1))
The main thing that youth has going for it is porpoise-tight skin. Raw, wide-eyed newness is meaningless. Nostalgia for knowing nothing is asinine; you can't recapture it and you don't want to relive it. Better to sing a song of experience with your burning tiger's heart.
Chelsea G. Summers (A Certain Hunger)
…pretty like the saddest thoughts are pretty. That’s what a song does, that’s its job. But that’s the sheen music puts on a thing, that’s nostalgia. And I hate it because it makes ugly things beautiful.
Ayana Mathis (The Unsettled)
These songs and albums were the best ones because of how huge adolescence felt then, and how nostalgia recasts it now.
Carrie Brownstein (Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir)
That’s why all of those records from high school sound so good. It’s. It that the songs were better- it’s that we were listening to them with our friends, drunk for the first time on liqueurs, touching sweaty palms, staring for hours at a poster on the wall, not grossed out by carpet or dirt or crumpled, oily bedsheets. These songs and albums were the best ones because of how huge adolescence felt then, and how nostalgia recasts it now. Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like we’ve lived. To get a sense that we have already journeyed through something- survived it, experienced it- is often so much easier and less messy than the task of currently living though something. Though hard to grasp, nostalgia is elating to bask in- temporarily restoring color to the past. It creates a sense memory that momentarily simulates context. Nostalgia is recall without the criticism of the present day, all the good parts, memory without the pain. Finally, nostalgia asks so little of us, just to be noticed and revisited; it doesn’t require the difficult task of negotiation, the heartache and uncertainty that the present does.
Carrie Brownstein (Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl)
The world moved on, with or without you. The songs you grew up listening to became classics and then, before you knew it, those songs were replaced by other songs that didn’t come out until after you graduated college. Eventually those would be replaced, too. Everything was replaced.
Max Booth III
Wicklow's Bounty: Ode to the Irish Strawberry by Stewart Stafford The Garden County's ruby hue; Juicy gush with tart aftertaste, Seeded cream teases the palate, A Summer afternoon without haste. Eireann's pride swallowed so well; Sunburst flesh, chilled bitterness, Enveloped in richest dairy pillows, Feel the divine fingerprint finesse. Amass nature's brief treasures, Don't wait, dear brother/sister, Before frosted breath chokes, Turning land's song into a whisper. © 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.
Stewart Stafford
But it isn’t just nostalgia or retrospectives that keep emo alive; it’s that confusing, made-up thing we talked about called “identity.” An identity is something you create. It’s a portrait you paint that you feel represents your soul most accurately. We define ourselves by the books we read, the photos we take, and the music that we listen to. Emo is very much alive within my identity; I consider it a part of who I am. But it’s not just a hobby or an interest. It is as much a core fiber of my being as are my heart and my thoughts. For some, it is as much a part of their identity as their gender or sexual orientation. Within these songs are my best and worst memories and my best and worst self. Within me is a desire to keep reminding the world how important emo was and is. Because no, it wasn’t just a phase or a passing fad. It wasn’t that music you listened to when you were thirteen and then gave up on when you became a “real adult.” Emo is credible. It is valuable. It is irreplaceable, and my friends and I—everyone in this book—want the world to recognize that.
Taylor Markarian (From the Basement: A History of Emo Music and How It Changed Society)
Is it, one wonders, only nostalgia that makes the music of the popular songs of that time seem more tuneful, the words more comprehensible, the feeling behind them more genuine than of any since? Certainly the dance music of the war years was enjoyed by all age groups, and respectable middle-aged citizens were not ashamed to be caught humming the hit tunes of the moment in those years when ‘popular’ music was truly popular.
Norman Longmate (How We Lived Then: History of Everyday Life During the Second World War, A)
We leave so much in time behind us. Old worlds, glasses full of whiskey & wine & memories. As children we dreamed of being, becoming. In this twilight we merely dream and sometimes wish for the magnificence of lost moments & days. How could it be that we once lived through these times and never realized that these were the sacred days of magic? Now all we have left are songs & photographs wherein our present being attempts to discover it's own rebirth. Therefore, 'to be' is the only answer.
R.M. Engelhardt (We Rise Like Smoke Poems Psalms Incantations)
Rob Young, in his essential Electric Eden, describes as Barrett being “strangely pushed and pulled between nostalgia for the secret garden of a child’s imagination and the space-age futurism of interstellar overdrive.” Barrett was channeling a spirit that was trying to pierce the veil between these worlds, and while this nostalgia and futurism, as Young puts it, seem opposed, they are actually two ideas at the heart of magic. The practice of magic is one requiring a link to the past and a vision of the future. Barrett added this directly to the lyrics of his songs and his live performances, experimenting with light and sound in an attempt to work the audience into a trance. The method is new, but the intention is ancient.
Peter Bebergal (Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll)
One night at the Old Vicarage that winter, we listened to Ivor Novello's "Perchance to Dream" on the wireless. It was only a few years old then, and its small, haunting, fragile hit-song 'We'll Gather Lilacs' was still a tune that one heard constantly, on the wireless, from orchestras in restaurants, being whistled in the street. To this day I have only to hear the first notes, in some programme of 'Golden Oldies', to go straight back to that time. What an arid place this world would be without nostalgia.
Rosemary Sutcliff (Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection)
i loved you quietly wanting only to baptise you with light upon light for the way you laugh into your neck in the courtyard of your dreams i loved you soft like satin wind gliding across the river of music and memory i kissed the cherry trees you crossed the scent of nostalgia wild under warm vernal rain i danced without a sound i loved you solely you between damp pages of starlings and songs while the moon wept i held you like a holy yes in my infinite solitude
Kamand Kojouri
Oh Tillietudlem, no matter whaur I be, Tillietudlem Castle 'll aye be dear tae me. T'was there I met my Mary when first I went to see Tillietudlem Castle and its bonny scenery.
Neil Munro (Erchie, My Droll Friend)
Weaning Your Baby Off Breast Milk The paediatrician in Sector 62 Mohali recommends the following tips for weaning your baby off breast milk: Recognize the Signs Your baby starts giving signs showing that they are ready for weaning. The signs include: Sitting with support. Holding their head in an upright position. Expressing interest in what you are eating. Losing their active tongue-thrust reflex. Acting cranky during feeding sessions. Apart from your child showing signs, you can also be the one to stop breastfeeding. You can check with your best paediatrician in Mohali to see if you are ready to start weaning. Set a Schedule Once you prepare yourself to start weaning, give yourself at least a month to move through the process. Giving some time to yourself and the baby gives you time for obstacles. If, however, your child is going through teething, you can wait for some time before weaning. Start Slowly Easing into weaning gives you and your baby some time to adjust to the change. You may start it slowly by dropping one breastfeeding session per week. Once you notice that both you and your baby are comfortable with the change, you can start dropping more sessions until your baby is having solids. Provide Physical Comfort Breastfed babies are used to skin contact with their mothers. Hence, when you are into weaning, you must give them the physical connection in other ways. For instance, you can cuddle them while singing a song reading a book or give them a massage. Let Your Baby Decide Some babies wean on their own when they are given the control. If you are comfortable with your child taking the lead, rely on one rule “Don’t offer, don’t refuse”. You nurse them when they show interest and do not initiate it when they don’t want it. Resistance is Normal If you are the one to start weaning, it will be normal for your babies to resist weaning. Once they become normal with it, they will start showing interest in solid foods and drinking liquids from a bottle. Take Care of Yourself Your baby is not only the one who will be adjusting to weaning. As a mother, you must also deal with a whole range of emotions. Some mothers may even feel rejected when their baby does not show interest in feeding. You may also feel nostalgia about your baby getting older. Accustom yourself to the routine and know that this is necessary. At Motherhood Hospitals, we have a team of experienced super specialists backed by the latest in infrastructure and facilities. We have the best Paediatricians in Mohali that consists of a team of paediatric specialists that cater to all the needs of children, across age groups, and provide the best care for your child’s development.
Dr. Sunney Narula
Lennon was – whether by luck, accident or perceptive foresight – at the forefront of the psychedelic era’s passion for rose-tinted introspection, which channelled the likes of children’s literature, Victorian fairgrounds and circuses, and an innocent sense of wonder. McCartney, too, moved with the times when writing his children’s singalong Yellow Submarine. Among the hippie era’s other moments of nostalgia were Pink Floyd’s Bike and The Gnome from their debut album Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, recorded at EMI Studios as the Beatles worked on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit, laid down in 1966 but released in the same month as Sgt Pepper, and which drew from Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories just as Lennon did; and many more, from Tiny Tim’s Tiptoe Through The Tulips to Traffic’s psychedelic fantasy Hole In My Shoe. The Beatles continued writing songs evoking childhood to the end of their days. Sgt Pepper – itself a loose concept album harking back to earlier, more innocent times – referenced Lewis Carroll (Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds), youthful anticipation of old age (When I’m Sixty-Four), a stroll down memory lane (Good Morning Good Morning), and the sensory barrage of a circus big top extravaganza (Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!). It was followed by Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine, two films firmly pitched at the widest possible audience. A splendid time was, indeed, guaranteed for all.
Joe Goodden (Riding So High: The Beatles and Drugs)
Ten Things I Need to Know" The brightest stars are the first to explode. Also hearts. It is important to pay attention to love’s high voltage signs. The mockingbird is really ashamed of its own feeble song lost beneath all those he has to imitate. It’s true, the Carolina Wren caught in the bedroom yesterday died because he stepped on a glue trap and tore his wings off. Maybe we have both fallen through the soul’s thin ice already. Even Ethiopia is splitting off from Africa to become its own continent. Last year it moved 10 feet. This will take a million years. There’s always this nostalgia for the days when Time was so unreal it touched us only like the pale shadow of a hawk. Parmenedes transported himself above the beaten path of the stars to find the real that was beyond time. The words you left are still smoldering like the cigarette left in my ashtray as if it were a dying star. The thin thread of its smoke is caught on the ceiling. When love is threatened, the heart crackles with anger like kindling. It’s lucky we are not like hippos who fling dung at each other with their ridiculously tiny tails. Okay, that’s more than ten things I know. Let’s try twenty five, no, let’s not push it, twenty. How many times have we hurt each other not knowing? Destiny wears her clothes inside out. Each desire is a memory of the future. The past is a fake cloud we’ve pasted to a paper sky. That is why our dreams are the most real thing we possess. My logic here is made of your smells, your thighs, your kiss, your words. I collect stars but have no place to put them. You take my breath away only to give back a purer one. The way you dance creates a new constellation. Off the Thai coast they have discovered a new undersea world with sharks that walk on their fins. In Indonesia, a kangaroo that lives in a tree. Why is the shadow I cast always yours? Okay, let’s say I list 33 things, a solid symbolic number. It’s good to have a plan so we don’t lose ourselves, but then who has taken the ladder out of the hole I’ve dug for myself? How can I revive the things I’ve killed inside you? The real is a sunset over a shanty by the river. The keys that lock the door also open it. When we shut out each other, nothing seems real except the empty caves of our hearts, yet how arrogant to think our problems finally matter when thousands of children are bayoneted in the Congo this year. How incredible to think of those soldiers never having loved. Nothing ever ends. Will this? Byron never knew where his epic, Don Juan, would end and died in the middle of it. The good thing about being dead is that you don’t have to go through all that dying again. You just toast it. See, the real is what the imagination decants. You can be anywhere with the turn of a few words. Some say the feeling of out-of-the-body travel is due to certain short circuits in parts of the brain. That doesn’t matter because I’m still drifting towards you. Inside you are cumulous clouds I could float on all night. The difference is always between what we say we love and what we love. Tonight, for instance, I could drink from the bowl of your belly. It doesn’t matter if our feelings shift like sands beneath the river, there’s still the river. Maybe the real is the way your palms fit against my face, or the way you hold my life inside you until it is nothing at all, the way this plant droops, this flower called Heart’s Bursting Flower, with its beads of red hanging from their delicate threads any breeze might break, any word might shatter, any hurt might crush. Superstition Reviews issue 2 fall 2008
Richard Jackson
Shimon turned sixteen on February 5, 1944. Three years earlier he had stood beneath the golden hands - the hands of the Kohanim - that adorned the ark of the Torah at Temple Taharat Hakodesh and chanted his Bible portion in Hebrew. A bar mitzvah boy. His mother and grandmother wept with pride. Did Shimon remember it was his birthday? Did he still believe in God? Occasionally the slaves sang Hebrew songs - songs 'filled with nostalgia, hope, and desire for life.' Did Shimon join in?
David Laskin (The Family: Three Journeys into the Heart of the Twentieth Century)
Ivo Andric, Bosnian chronicle (Quote about nostalgia, free translation from Bosnian lenguage) More than three hundred years ago, brought us from our homeland, a unique Andalusia, a terrible, foolish, fratricidal whirlwind, which we can not understand even today, and who has not understood it to this day, scattered us all over the world and made us beggars to which gold does not help. Now, threw us on the East, and life on the East is not easy for us or blessed, and the as much man goes further and gets closer to the sun's birth, it is worse, because the land is younger and more raw and people are from the land. And our trouble is that we could not fully love this country, to which we owe becouse it has received us, accept us and provided us with shelter, nor could we hate the one who has unjustly took us away and expelled us as an unworthly sons. We do not know is it more difficult that we are here or that we are not there. Wherever we were outside of Spain, we would suffer because we would have two homelands, I know, but here life is too much pressed us and humiliated us. I know that we have been changed for a long time,we do not remember anymore how we were, but surely we remember that we were different. We left and road up long time ago and we traveled hard and we unluckily fell down and stopped at this place, and that is why we are no longer even a shadow of what we were. As a powder on a fruit that goes hand-to-hand, from man first fall of what is finest on him. That's why we are like this. But you know us, us and our life, if we can call this life. We live between "occupiers" and commonalty, miserable commonalty and terrible Turkish. Cutted away completely from our loved ones, we are careful to look after and keep everything Spanish, songs and meals and customs, but we feel that everything changes in us, spoils and forgets. We remember the language of our land, the lenguage we did take and carried three centuries ago, the lenguage which even do not speak there anymore, and we ridiculously speak with stumbling the language of the comonalty with which we suffer and the Turkish who rules over us. So it may not be a long day when we will be purely and humanly able to express ourselves only in prayer, and which actually does not need any words. This so lonely and few, we marry between us and see that our blood is paling and fainting. We bend and shred in front of everyone, we mourn, suffer and contrive, as people said: on the ice we make campfire, we work, we gain, we save, not only for ourselves and for our children, but for all those who are stronger and more insolent, impudent than us and strike on our life , on the dignity, and on the wealth. So we preserved the faith for which we had to leave our beautiful country, but lost almost everything else. Luckily, and to our sorrow, we did not lose from our memory reminiscence of our dear country, as it was, before she drive away us like stepmother; just as it will never extinguish in us the desire for a better world, the world of order and humanity in which you goes stright, watches calmly and speaks openly. We can not free ourselves from that feeling, nor feeling that, in addition to everything, we belong to such a world, though, we are expelled and unhappy, otherwise we live. That's what we would like to know there. That our name does not die in that brighter and higher world that is constantly darkening and destroying, iconstantly moves and changes, but never collapses, and always for somebody exists, that that world knows that we are carrying him in our soul, that even here we serve him on our way, and we feel one with him, even though we are forever and hopelessly separated from him.
Ivo Andrić (Bosnian Chronicle (Bosnian Trilogy, #2))
Perché la scomoda verità era che nessuno era del tutto buono o del tutto cattivo. Né madri né padri, né figli né figlie, né mogli né mariti. La vita sarebbe stata molto più facile se fosse stato così. Invece ognuno portava in sé una mescolanza confusa di amore e odio, gioia e dolore, nostalgia e oblio, verità travisate e inganni dolorosi.
Jamie Ford (Songs of Willow Frost)
Are you kidding? It was beautiful!' exclaimed the janitor. 'Just because you did something when you were younger doesn’t make it stupid. It doesn’t matter if it was a little college show or Broadway, meaningful things are still meaningful things. People can make fun of you for it, sour people, call you childish, but I been around a long time. Both of your two lives combined. And there’s no guarantee people get to do a great show of A Doll’s House ever again. Either life happens or death happens and we may never get another chance. Least thing we can do is to wake up in the morning and protect the good things that were. The past deserves it.
Kristian Ventura (The Goodbye Song)
Memories with people are weird things because oftentimes, you’re the only one who still has them.
Kristian Ventura (The Goodbye Song)
Phoebe makes her way and leaves. Grant is frozen. A whole minute goes by. Then, he reaches forward, clutching the air that used to be occupied. It was occupied right? Yes. Yes, she was right here. Right here. Oh, how fast things change.
Kristian Ventura (The Goodbye Song)
I hate running into people. They take the random places. That door over there. Fuck that door. It was an hour before class on the first day and Justin came out right as I was walking in. Bumped in and scared the ba- Jesus out of me and every time I walked into that door, I remembered him. For four years that space belonged to that moment. It’s like everywhere we walk, all we see internally is a landmark of people and moments you’ll never have again.
Kristian Ventura (The Goodbye Song)
Jude wrote: I’m writing this sentence to confirm: I think about the past, I’m scared to go out in public, I miss a lot of people, I long for connection but no one impresses me, and the future is scary. I have hope that I am not a stranger to this world. To know again, my only relief.
Kristian Ventura (The Goodbye Song)
XVII. Thinking, Tangling Shadows" Thinking, tangling shadows in the deep solitude. You are far away too, oh farther than anyone. Thinking, freeing birds, dissolving images, burying lamps. Belfry of fogs, how far away, up there! Stifling laments, milling shadowy hopes, taciturn miller, night falls on you face downward, far from the city. You presence is foreign, as strange to me as a thing. I think, I explore great tracts of my life before you. My life before anyone, my harsh life. The shout facing the sea, among the rocks, running free, mad, in the sea-spray. The sad rage, the shout, the solitude of the sea. Headlong, violent, stretched towards the sky. You, woman, what were you there, what ray, what vane of that immense fan? You were as far as you are now. Fire in the forest! Burn in blue crosses. Burn, burn, flame up, sparkle in trees of light. It collapses, crackling. Fire. Fire. And my soul dances, seared with curls of fire. Who calls? What silence peopled with echoes? Hour of nostalgia, hour of happiness, hour of solitude, hour that is mine from among them all! Hunting horn through which the wind passes singing. Such a passion of weeping tied to my bedy. Shaking of all the roots, attack of all the waves! My soul wandered, happy, sad, unending. Thinking, burying lamps in the deep solitude. Who are you, who are you?
Pablo Neruda (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair)
When congregations gather for worship they may be hooked on a feeling stirred by nostalgia or novelty instead of spirit and truth worship. So if those feelings are not elicited because they don’t know or don’t particularly like the songs, they can even leave the worship service believing that worship couldn’t and didn’t occur.
David W. Manner (Better Sundays Begin on Monday: 52 Exercises for Evaluating Weekly Worship)
Whale music had a weight to it, a ponderous, profound theme. The deeper notes resonated in his tissue and filled him with sweet nostalgia. A stuttering creak swept through—the slow rocking of a porch swing, a patio door caught in a summer draft. Then, the soft groan of settling into freshly laundered sheets for a long, long sleep.
Erinn L. Kemper (The Song)
Sometimes I feel like I'm ok, then I hear a song and start bleeding out again.
Mr. Joshua Shaw (I Took a Plane to Die in Denver (The Dead in Denver Trilogy Book 2))
It ran so rampant among Swiss mercenaries fighting far-flung wars that playing “Khue-Reyen”—an old Swiss milking song that seemed to send soldiers into a contagiously nostalgic frenzy—was punishable by death. Matei goes on to explain how cures for nostalgia included being burned with a hot poker and punishments included being buried alive.
Brené Brown (Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience)
The emotions that are firing these new songs are similar to the ones that gave Face Value its power, impact and, ultimately I hope, resonance. They’re me, laid open and laid bare. On my first solo album, and on this, my fifth, I put it all out there. In the long run this is why Face Value and Both Sides are my two favorite albums, and why No Jacket Required doesn’t come close for me. Specifically, on Both Sides the rage and hurt of Face Value is replaced by the pang of regret, heartache and nostalgia.
Phil Collins (Not Dead Yet: The Memoir)