Quotes about Nostalgia

The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)

In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there.

During the twenty years of Odesseus' absence, the people of Ithaca retained many recollections of him but never felt nostalgia for him. Whereas Odysseus did suffer nostalgia, and remembered almost nothing. ..... For four long books of the Odyssey he had retraced in detail his adventures before the dazzled Phaeacians. But in Ithaca he was not a stranger, he was one of their own, so it never occurred to anyone to say, 'Tell us!

Mesmerized, all she can do is watch this piece of her life move off; all she can do is watch it and suffer. She is experiencing a brand-new feeling called nostalgia. That feeling, that irrepressible yearning to return, suddenly reveals to her the existence of the past, the power of the past, of her past; in the house of her life […] from now on her existence will be inconceivable without these feelings.

Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

The past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a love the way we reread a book or resee a film.

One day we'll be glad to have the pictures...

I catch myself thinking about him in the past tense all the time.

I was very entertained by Betty Grable and Judy Garland.

The wife smiled and added, "Never forget that your twenty- or thirty- or even forty-something husband is still a little boy inside who used to say to his mom, 'Watch me! Watch me!' They never completely get over that.

I can't remember a Friday when I was younger when I wasn't eating a pizza, flirting with the barman.