I think you can only be nostalgic for something you've lost.
The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
The thing that makes love stories work, in my opinion, in movies and novels and country & western songs, is the feeling of longing.
Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live My very life again though cold in death; Come back to me in dreams, that I may give Pulse for pulse, breath for breath: Speak low, lean low, As long ago, my love, how long ago
Sometimes nostalgia is a cage.
It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
It scares me how hard it is to remember life before you. I can't even make the comparisons anymore, because my memories of that time have all the depth of a photograph. It seems foolish to play games of better and worse. It's simply a matter of is and is no longer.
I have now and again tried to imagine the perfect environment, the ideal conditions for reading: A worn leather armchair on a rainy night? A hammock in a freshly mown backyard? A verandah overlooking the summer sea? Good choices, every one. But I have no doubt that they are all merely displacements, sentimental attempts to replicate the warmth and snugness of my mother's lap.
Nostalgia paints a smile on the stony face of the past.
We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one's life?
I get very nostalgic for times and places and experiences, but I have a wonderful group of core friends and family who I love and adore, so I don't mourn the loss of any particular friendship. I think they're all part of a path, and the ones that really mean something are still important in my life.
The deeper the nostalgia and the more complete the fear, the purer, the richer the word and the secret.
Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality.
I'm terribly nostalgic, but I'm with the Elizabethans who thought nostalgia was a disease. It's a dangerous place to be because you can get caught up in it.
Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.
The union of a want and a sentiment.
But though first love's impassioned blindness Has passed away in colder light, I still have thought of you with kindness, And shall do, till our last goodnight. The ever-rolling silent hours Will bring a time we shall not know, When our young days of gathering flowers Will be an hundred years ago.
I dwell with a strangely aching heart In that vanished abode there far apart
Nostalgia, the vice of the aged.
Missing you?" she giggled incredulously. "I could cheerfully murder you." "I'd come back to haunt you," he threatened with a grin. "And that," she said, "is the only reason why I haven't tried.
You don't need to be seeing someone to be in love with her. You can have lost touch with her, she can have hurt you, even inexplicably. If you ever felt that you really knew her and that it was what you knew that you loved, and if you remember what it was you once knew, why is it so crazy to retain that love still?
Nostalgia is a dangerous emotion, both because it is powerless to act in the real world, and because it glides so easily into hatred and resentment against those who have taken our Eden from us.
My eyes are dim with childish tears, My heart is idly stirred, For the same sound is in my ears Which in those days I heard.
I'm a nostalgic person and I really like rehashing and digging around the mental trunks.
. . .I really ought to have recognized it for what it was and, perhaps, to have stopped right there - for it was nostalgia, and what inspires nostalgia has been dead a long time
