Nostalgia Quotes

“He decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“Freedom, "that terrible word inscribed on the chariot of the storm," is the motivating principle of all revolutions. Without it, justice seems inconceivable to the rebel's mind. There comes a time, however, when justice demands the suspension of freedom. Then terror, on a grand or small scale, makes its appearance to consummate the revolution. Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. But one day nostalgia takes up arms and assumes the responsibility of total guilt; in other words, adopts murder and violence.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel

“For sailors who love the wind, memory is a good port of departure.”
― Eduardo Hughes Galeano, Walking Words

“The nostalgia of a moment's love can be an illusionary precipice from which we fall from truth; in heartbreak, what we escape to in the past is what tortures us in the present.”
― Mike Norton

“Was that what was so painful: that nobody had ever come so close to me- nobody had ever seen me, and come right up to me, and kept going, and looked into my eyes so seriously, with so little fear?”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“Anyway, those things would not have lasted long.
The experience of the years shows it to me.
But Destiny arrived in some haste and stopped them.
The beautiful life was brief.
But how potent were the perfumes,
On how splendid a bed we lay,
To what sensual delight we gave our bodies.

An echo of the days of pleasure,
An echo of the days drew near me,
A little of the fire of the youth of both of us,
Again I took in my hands a letter,
And I read and reread till the light was gone.

And melancholy, I came out on the balcony
Came out to change my thoughts at least by looking at
A little of the city that I loved,
A little movement on the street and in the shops.

Translated by Rae Dalven”
― C.P. Cavafy

“He couldn’t believe that sleep had robbed him of this spectacle night after night. Such are the writer’s privileges, he thought, nostalgic already for the present.”
― César Aira, Varamo

“The thing about memories wasn't that many of them inevitably faded, but that repeated recall of the ones you remembered burnished them into shining, gorgeous lies”
― Dexter Palmer, Version Control

“I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“When I was a kid, they had a saying, 'to err is human but to really fuck it up takes a computer.’ ”
― Benjamin R. Smith, Atlas

“Advice is a form of Nostalgia”
― Mary Schmich, Wear Sunscreen: A Primer for Real Life

“We men of this age are rotten with book-lore and with a yearning for the past.”
― James Elroy Flecker, The Last Generation A Story of the Future

“And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that—except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“Because honor still matters. Honor is what echoes." His father's words. But they are as empty on his lips as they feel in my ears. This was has taken everything from him. I see in his eyes how broken he is. how terribly hard he is trying to be his father's son. If he could, he would choose to be back by the campfire we made in the highlands of the Institute. He would return to the days of glory when life was simple, when friends seemed true. But wishing for the past doesn't clean the blood from either of our hands.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“There was so much time that marvelous summer. Day after day, mist rose from the meadow as the sky lightened and hedges, barns and woods took shape until, at last, the long curving back of the hills lifted away from the Plain. It was a sort of stage-magic.”
― J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country

“Nostalgia não é saudade.
sim, são sinonimas, mas "sinônimo" é o mismo que "semelhante" e não "idêntico"
"Idêntico" é cem por cento "igual", enquanto que em "semelhante há pelo menos um percentual minimo de "diferente", de cualquier maneira saudade não e nostalgia.
Nostalgia é a nausea que se encontra numa paisagem. num cheiro. numa música, num vento que nos carrega para tão proximo de reviver una história, porem se esvai num relance.
Saudade é a falta que se sente do que já se foi, saudade se afina, saudade não e provocada no lance de uma sensação. Saudade e a própia sensação constante, um sentimiento abstrato quase sólido a beira do palpável.”
― Juliano Ramos de Oliveira

“And perhaps we have reason to be very grateful that, both as children and long afterwards, we are never allowed to guess how the absorbing pursuit of the moment will appear, not only to others, but to ourselves, a very short time hence.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Golden Age

“You may say, But wasn't this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“I listened, while the scents found their hiding places in the cracks in the floorboards, and the words of the story, and the rest of my life.”
― Erica Bauermeister, The Scent Keeper

“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

“Dark came early and stayed full of lights and the shouts of children.”
― China Miéville, Kraken

“I didn't really want to come back here and again have to feel like my lungs were drowning in this perverse nostalgia.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“The sixties are like a theme park to them. They wear the costume, buy their tickets, and they have the experience.”
― Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet

“What seems real one moment is fiction the next
and gone out of existence the moment after that.
Nostalgia is the greatest enemy of truth,
and change our only constancy.”
― David Budbill, Judevine: The Complete Poems, 1970-1990

“We shouldn’t be forced to choose at all. The fury in Aida’s voice was familiar. Nostalgic. I’d once possessed that strain of fury, as had my fellow cooks, my friends, my produce guy, a virulent rage against our tainted inheritance of this stupid, smog-choked planet. But it couldn’t last. We’d been inoculated from rage by other, more immediate concerns. For example: how to pay rent, how to stay alive. Aida, rich as she was, hadn’t been forced to choose between anger and dinner. For the first time in years, I tasted, through her, that feeling.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Não ter nascido bicho parece ser uma de minhas secretas nostalgias.”
― Clarice Lispector, De Bichos e Pessoas

“...underneath that I'd said something else: we were both a couple of asswipes, and now only I'm an asswipe; why? And underneath that, something else: once an asswipe, always an asswipe.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Bernostalgia selalu terasa menyedihkan, walau di dalam kesedihan itu ada keindahan yang misterius.”
― Fenny Wong, Hanami

“Nostalgia is not linked only with being away from one's homeland, as one may feel nostalgia , too, inside his own homeland.”
― Mohamed Adly, Coco De Mer - the Forbidden Fruit

“It is idle to say there is no such garden. Everyone recognises the same nostalgia... Paradise is neither a moment nor a place; it is a condition. So when the lover calls to his or her beloved to come into the garden, it is, in the final implication, a summons to overcome to human condition.”
― Richard Cavendish, The Tarot