Quotes about Nostalgia

Later, it would occur to me it's the emptiness we mistakenly call Innocence.

Home. The word circled comfortably in my mouth like bubble gum, swished around sweetly soft and satisfying. Home. Try saying it aloud to yourself. Home. Isn’t it like taking a bite of something lovely? If only we could eat words.

Backward turn backward o time in your flight Make me a child again just for tonight...

We shook hands. Norm’s hand felt like salted mackerel. Our brief interaction had put him in a talkative mood. “There’s no business like shoe business,” he uttered with a death rattle laugh, heh heh, peering at me sideways like a depraved cherub as he droned on and on about the good old days in the shoe business, the bonus money and the belles whose stockinged ankles he fondled when he could still get a boner … but my mind was elsewhere. I couldn’t stop thinking about Luke Soloman, Luke Soloman, Luke Soloman. Who was this character?

"I was filled with longing for joyful permanent fixations, and insight, for play and a secular individualism, a spiritual life and some unnameable opportunity like a right I vaguely remembered and couldn't get purchase on. It was no good. It took me years and one mistake after another to realize this and even then I simply got washed out, put aside I didn't really learn a lesson. I know it's not so much the mistakes not the divisions, or cultural impediments, the threats and isolation techniques we run on each other it's the heart. My father went to his grave unchanged. So did Poe. And beautiful Anna Karenina. And Ovid. Consuela Concepcion, too, my piano teacher. They say in the end Mussolini was so terrified his mind seized and he couldn't speak. He sat there swelled-up and bug-eyed. This is not it. Or anyone drowning or lurching from the fire shrieking he didn't want this to happen. There is so much gibberish. And imprecision. No wonder we lock in. Like you, I get scared. I used to go to my friend's house, sink into the old sofa on his back porch and read all day. His family and the ducks and dogs would pass by, let me be—discreet love—I'd feel safe."

"Saint George and the Dragon!-Bonny Saint George for Merry England!-The castle is won!"

It's not a single idea, but many ideas and attitudes, including a reverence for nature and a preference for country life; a desire for maximum personal self-reliance and creative leisure; a concern for family nurture and community cohesion; a certain hostility toward luxury; a belief that the primary reward of work should be well-being rather than money; a certain nostalgia for the supposed simplicities of the past and an anxiety about the technological and bureaucratic complexities of the present and the future; and a taste for the plain and functional.

Optimists are nostalgic about the future.

People seem to get nostalgic about a lot of things they weren't so crazy about the first time around.

Nostalgia is recalling the fun without reliving the pain.

Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson. You find the present tense and the past perfect.

Scents bring memories, and many memories bring nostalgic pleasure. We would be wise to plan for this when we plant a garden.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

One may, with Hartshorne and other rationalist philosophers, press rationality to the point of postulating certain necessary truths for which we have no conceivable alternatives. Or, like Buddhist thinkers of many periods-and like Wieman, too-one may find in the very conditions of contingency a religious significance that informs the whole quality of life as lived. Contingency embraced without any nostalgia or yearning for necessary truth yields a different quality of life than contingency assented to as necessarily so in the absence of any conceivable alternative.

The Names . . . have existed from all eternity: these Names are designated as "Lords" (Arbab), who often have all the appearance of hypostases though they cannot strictly be defined as such. We know them only by our knowledge of ourselves (that is the basic maxim). God describes Himself to us through ourselves. Which means that the divine Names are essentially relative to the beings who name them, since these beings discover and experience them in their own mode of being. . . . Thus the divine Names have meaning and full reality only through and for beings . . . in which they are manifested. Likewise from all eternity, these forms, substrate of the divine Names, have existed in the divine Essence (A 'yan thabita). And it is these latent individualities who from all eternity have aspired to concrete being in actu. Their aspiration is itself nothing other than the nostalgia of the divine Names yearning to be revealed. And this nostalgia of the divine Names is nothing other than the sadness of the unrevealed God, the anguish He experiences in His unknownness and occultation.

It is not necessary to imagine the world ending in either fire or ice. There are two other possibilities. One is paperwork, the other is nostalgia.

It is not necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paper work, and the other is nostalgia.

Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent; it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence.