How did he get here? What drew him back? Easy answer: the monkey bars. Not-so-easy answer. . . . What took him away in the first place? Gyroscopic deflections are only partly to blame. Who...

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that...

She used to wander through the past as often as it beckoned her, bemoaning the loss of nostalgia. Then, for a while, she turned from it, blissfully free of its noxious clutch, and now it’s...

…quando perdi qualcuno e questo qualcuno ti manca, tu soffri perché la persona assente si è trasformata in un essere immaginario: irreale. Ma il tuo desiderio di lei non è immaginario. Così è a quello...

One may escape from the prisons of experience, ideology or philosophy, but it is impossible to escape from the reality of one’s innermost self. Understanding this, I had freed myself from nostalgia, and having done...

Apocalyptic saucer cults have started to spring up all over America. One small group, which has been receiving messages from outer space via Lake City housewife Mrs. Marian Keech, becomes the subject of a research...

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,...

Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way–and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.

The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else’s nostalgia

When it comes down to all that ‘go green’ crap, you have to ask yourself, is it worth risking a person’s income, their job, their family… their life? I’m not saying you’re wrong, but these...

I wonder what it felt to move to a country where you didn’t grow up. I had thought about that often since my sister got married. Do you become a character in a story native...

There are a few moments in your life when you are truly and completely happy, and you remember to give thanks. Even as it happens you are nostalgic for the moment, you are tucking it...

El exiliado mira hacia el pasado, lamiéndose las heridas; el inmigrantemira hacia el futuro, dispuesto a aprovechar las oportunidades a su alcance.

It’s amazing how nostalgia filters out the bad and focuses only on the good.

The only thing I have left to remember her by is the scent of her perfume. I just broke into her car and stole the bottle.

Siempre es levemente siniestro volver a los lugares que han sido testigos de un instante de perfección

In that moment I understood what they say about nostalgia, that no matter if you’re thinking something good or bad, it always leaves you a little emptier afterward.

When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered…the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls…bearing resiliently, on tiny and...

We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn’t even know it.

Ludwik Szatera was a passionate lover of nostalgia. He could never come to terms with the eternal passage of men, objects and events. Each moment inexorably turning into the past was to him precious, invaluable,...

PatriotismBreathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, ‘This is my own, my native land!’ Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d As home his footsteps he hath turn’dFrom...

photographs are very interesting, and you can look into them a million times and still find a new meaning in them, something in the past that was caught in the film itself…

My whole life is out here-the whole of my life…I’d come here naked, as a boy-straight from that river out there-throw my clothes on the floor and climb into that loft and lie there dreaming...

I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he...

Reading all my old love letters was disorienting. You remember thinking the thoughts and writing the words but, man, you can’t TOUCH those feelings. Its like they belonged to someone else. Someone you don’t even...

If the Holy Communion touched my teeth, I thought that was a mortal sin

I drank her essence, and it’s like she never existed and now I’m thirsty again. Let this be a lesson in love.

Fyodor Pavlovitch was drunk when he heard of his wife’s death, and the story is that he ran out into the street and began shouting with joy, raising his hands to Heaven: “Lord, now lettest...

Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I’ve forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly...

You are the sun before risethe sun before setthe moon before lightthe sea before shoreflower before floresome before thingYou are everything

Philosophy is really nostalgia, the desire to be at home.

Things aren’t what they used to be’ is the rallying cry of small minds. When men say things used to be better, they invariably mean they were better for them, because they were young, and...

What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.

Nostalgia is an illness for those who haven’t realized that todayis tomorrow’s nostalgia.

Above all, staring at my old bedroom ceiling, I feel safe. Cocooned from the world; wrapped up in cotton wool. No one can get me here. No one even knows I’m here. I won’t get...

Mandy smiled cheerfully at an overweight kid in a gold sweater and pink skirt who was chasing her little brother around along the boardwalk. When she was that age, on sunny days she’d be out...

Why was everyone so interested in her now? When it was too late to change anything? What was the point?

I couldn’t understand how boldness and sorrow, how you’re so hard and do you really care for me? could be so thoroughly bound together. Nor could I begin to fathom how someone so seemingly vulnerable,...

how I wish I could fist a bit of old-fashioned beef in the fore-castle, as I used to when i was before the mast.

It’s the problem in seeing too much of the world. In loving too much of it. You can only live in one place at a time. And eventually, you pick your spot, and the memories...

I possess an object that reminds me of your stepdad’s bowel movements. It’s brown and squishy and smells like yesterday.

Perhaps a creature of so much ingenuity and deep memory is almost bound to grow alienated from his world, his fellows, and the objects around him. He suffers from a nostalgia for which there is...

Jeeter?” Grace whispered into her walkie-talkie. “Are you awake?” She waited.A few weeks ago, she and Jeeter had started chatting on their walkie-talkies late at night when she couldn’t sleep. He always answered her call...

And yet, it was still a performance. Odin and I both knew it. It was a kind of play, a dream of how things might have been if he and I had been capable of...

Television hols up a mirror to the true nature of family life today. For the first time people see themselves reflected and refracted within its curved glass screen: helping them to define who the are...

It may be that writers in my position,exiles, or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutilated into pillars...

There is no cause for nostalgia save the good and life-enhancing nostalgia for the present.

…TV was entertainment of the last resort. There was nothing on during the day in the summer other than game shows and soap operas. Besides, a TV-watching child was considered available for chores: take out...

For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now...

The past is for learning from and letting go. You can’t revisit it. It vanishes.