Nostalgic Pain Quotes

Sometimes nostalgia is a cage.

Wow. When he started looking back on the war with Kronos as the good old days--that was sad.

Who wants to live with one foot in hell just for the sake of nostalgia Our time is forever now.

Children's games are stronger than you remember once you've grown up and left them behind. They're always fair, and never kind.

And, even yet, I dare not let it languish, Dare not indulge in memory's rapturous pain; Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish, How could I seek the empty world again?

And then, into the fantasy, as into a dream, would come the thought: it's not like this anymore; the world has changed. Just the way, even at that time fully two years after my mother's death, I'd catch myself thinking about her as alive; and would suddenly remember, an admonitory finger of grief upon my breast, that she was gone.

He had never liked October. Ever since he had first lay in the autumn leaves before his grandmother's house many years ago and heard the wind and saw the empty trees. It had made him cry, without a reason. And a little of that sadness returned each year to him. It always went away with spring. But, it was a little different tonight. There was a feeling of autumn coming to last a million years. There would be no spring. ("The October Game")

...when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.

Oily marks appear on walls / Where pleasure moments hung before

Some moments supersaturate, take on almost more than one tiny fragment of time can hold. How...can you hold this sort of memory of someone and at the same time just try to seem normally, regularly, pleased when she comes back to visit for a few days every few years?

You will hear thunder and remember me, And think: she wanted storms. The rim Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson, And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.

This is the trouble with cheating: there are no acceptable rules, or laws. It could be a smile, or dancing to a song that you considered to be indefinably 'ours'. It can feel like cheating to go to a restaurant that you used to go to with someone else. Keeping photographs of exes can infuriate, like retrospective cheating.

memories should be sharp when one has nothing else to live for

I had a wonderful childhood, which is tough because it's hard to adjust to a miserable adulthood.

I'd like to just say that there's nothing darker than 'Old Yeller' and 'Bambi' and some of the early Disney stuff.

These were our bedtime stories. Tales that haunted our parents and made them laugh at the same time. We never understood them until we were fully grown and they became our sole inheritance.