Literary Nostalgia Quotes

So there you have it, a lifetime of first smelling the books, they all smell wonderful, reading the books, loving the books, and remembering the books.

A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.

Raised in a house filled with old books, I'm drawn to them: the dust jackets that call out a historical moment, the marbled boards, the words pressed into the page with movable type.

I just downloaded '1984' for my iPod, but I've read that before. It just hearkens back to the 'romance' of my high-school days. I really liked the space I was in when I was reading it.

I read a whole lot as a child, and, of course, I still read children's books.

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.

I was brought up on Dickens. I remember reading 'Bleak House' but, coming back to it, I didn't remember much about it apart from a few characters.

The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.

For the Tintin books were my emotional universe. To read them felt quite simply like being loved: in advance and by an entire world of pure possibility, my future. But to write to the author was to reach out for the lover. Even today, the power of reading one remains visceral: each book acts as a form of transportation, not just to the emotional landscape of this first literary love affair but to very specific memories.

I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.

Rereading one's own novels after many years is always a fraught business, but when a novel has fallen out of print - 'The Very Model of a Man' is the only novel of mine that has - and so crops up infrequently in conversations with readers or indeed with oneself, revisiting it can be perilous.

I would quite like to have been a 1920s writer.

Some writers you return to again and again, and for me, Nancy Mitford is one of them.

My fingers positively itched to drift at length along their spines, to arrive at one whose lure I could not pass, to pluck it down, to inch it open, then to close my eyes and inhale the soul-sparking scent of old and literate dust.

I don't know a writer who doesn't feel some sense of glamour and magic and a complex, wistful sadness emanating from the expats of the twenties in France. Some of the sadness, of course, is that we weren't there.

How well I know what I mean to do When the long dark Autumn evenings come, And where, my soul, is thy pleasant hue? With the music of all thy voices, dumb In life’s November too! I shall be found by the fire, suppose, O’er a great wise book as beseemeth age, While the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows, And I turn the page, and I turn the page, Not verse now, only prose!

The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious-think of Cervantes!

A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.

I have a confession to make. The love affair of my life has been with the Greek language. I have now reached the age when it has occurred to me that I may have read some books for the last time. I suddenly thought that there are books I cannot bear not to read again before I die. One that stands out a mile is Homer's Iliad.

A precious, mouldering pleasure 't is, to meet an antique book, In just the dress his century wore; A privilege I think.

When I was in my 20s in the 1970s, I read all of Jean Rhys. I have reread very little since because the first impressions were so powerful they have stayed with me.

I love the process of cracking the spine for the first time and slowly sinking into a book. That will soon seem old-fashioned, I'm sure, like the time of illuminated manuscripts.

I don't reread my books.

Going back to Hemingway's work after several years is like going back to a brook where you had often fished and finding the woods as deep and cool as they used to be.

There's a lot of fiction from that period that we're nostalgic for.