Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.

There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it.

Sometimes loneliness makes the loudest noise.

how sad and bad and mad it was - but then, how it was sweet

Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

Ten long trips around the sun since I last saw that smile, but only joy and thankfulness that on a tiny world in the vastness, for a couple of moments in the immensity of time, we were one.

The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.

Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.

There is something incredibly nostalgic and significant about the annual cascade of autumn leaves.

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

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

Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.

The nostalgia of a moment's love can be an illusionary precipice from which we fall from truth; in heartbreak, what we escape to in the past is what tortures us in the present.

What seems real one moment is fiction the nextand gone out of existence the moment after that.Nostalgia is the greatest enemy of truth,and change our only constancy.

The thing about memories wasn't that many of them inevitably faded, but that repeated recall of the ones you remembered burnished them into shining, gorgeous lies

Between the MileI have always counted the miles.Sometimes they came quick,Other times slow.The distance between things,The way I could know.Close could feel far,And far could feel near.The miles that passed too quickly,The ones I ran out of fear.They weren’t all the same,So I had been told,The unmarked trails,And the days I was bold.Some miles went down,Spiraling so low,When I was afraid to look forward,There was nowhere to go.The sunset came fast,And the day turned to night,But the trails could be endless,If I looked at them right.Everything I knew,All I was told,The conversations left behind,The people who grew old.When the miles stretched out before me,I wanted to sew them at the seam,Looking forward and then back,Holding everything in between.

If you are a dreamer, come in,If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer...If you're a pretender, come sit by my fireFor we have some flax-golden tales to spin. Come in!Come in!

I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people.

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 away in your scrapbook.

Nos-tal-gic,’ Akira said, as though it were a word he had been struggling to find. Then he said a word in Japanese, perhaps the Japanese for ‘nostalgic.’ ‘Nos-tal-gic. It is good to be nos-tal-gic. Very important.’‘Really, old fellow?’‘Important. Very important. Nostalgic. When we nostalgic, we remember. A world better than this world we discover when we grow. We remember and wish good world come back again. So very important. Just now, I had dream. I was boy. Mother, Father, close to me. in our house.’He fell silent and continued to gaze across the rubble.‘Akira,’ I said, sensing that the longer this talk went on, the greater was some danger I did not wish fully to articulate. ‘We should move on. We have much to do.

That was happiness. Not the framed greatest hits, but the moments in between. At the time, I hadn't pegged them as being particularly happy. But now, looking back at those phantom snapshots, I'm struck by my calm, my ease, the evident comfort with my life. I'm happy in retrospect.

There are many forms of love as there is moments in time, and you are capable of feeling them all at different stages of your life.

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 took some of you with him.

s father's words. But they are as empty on his lips as they feel in my ears. This was has taken everything from him. I see in his eyes how broken he is. how terribly hard he is trying to be his father's son. If he could, he would choose to be back by the campfire we made in the highlands of the Institute. He would return to the days of glory when life was simple, when friends seemed true. But wishing for the past doesn't clean the blood from either of our hands.

You can miss places. You can miss people.Just know that what you’re really missing is the way things were. And even if you could go there again…. see them again…. you can’t go back.They’re not the same.You’re not the same.The loss of them changed you.

For it is up to you and meto take solacein nostalgia's armsand our abilityto create the everlastingfrom fleeting moments.

The aching in my chest isn't because I miss you,it's realizing that you have become someone I no longer know,your fears, your 4 am thoughts, your achievements,are things I no longer have an equivalent to.Who we were and who we are are four different people, and the me from now doesn't relate to the me from then, let alone to the you from now.-Tanzy Sayadi and Jarod Kintz

The campus, an academy of trees,under which some hand, the wind's I guess,had scattered the pale lightof thousands of spring beauties,petals stained with pink veins;secret, blooming for themselves.We sat among them.Your long fingers, thin body,and long bones of improbable genius;some scattered gene as Kafka must have had.Your deep voice, this passing dust of miracles.That simple that was myself, half conscious,as though each moment was a pagewhere words appeared; the bent hammer of the typestruck against the moving ribbon.The light air, the restless leaves;the ripple of time warped by our longing.There, as if we were paintedby some unknown impressionist.

Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imaginedfuture, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love ora passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convincedthat even the smallest particle of the surrounding world wascharged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, andone would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind-loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by thehigh, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, somany and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like firefliesin the perfumed heat of summer night.

How quick and rushing life can sometimes seem, when at the same time it's so slow and sweet and everlasting.

Many contemporary critics of higher education similarly posit a Golden Age but no one knows when it was supposed to exist.

Nostalgia is the only acceptable form of sadness.

College was at the heart of his sentimental imagination.

it's good to have things done withwhen they don't workit's also good not to hateor even forgetthe person you've failed with.

Between the MilesI have always counted the miles.Sometimes they came quick,Other times slow.The distance between things,The way I could know.Close could feel far,And far could feel near.The miles that passed too quickly,The ones I ran out of fear.They weren’t all the same,So I had been told,The unmarked trails,And the days I was bold.Some miles went down,Spiraling so low,When I was afraid to look forward,There was nowhere to go.The sunset came fast,And the day turned to night,But the trails could be endless,If I looked at them right.Everything I knew,All I was told,The conversations left behind,The people who grew old.When the miles stretched out before me,I wanted to sew them at the seam,Looking forward and then back,Holding everything in between.

There is nothing more agonising than the memory of good times when you are going through a difficult period in life. Life moves in only one direction - forward, but the memoirs of years gone by keep on haunting one’s soul till the time one is alive. Nostalgia can be more painful than a surgeon’s knife.

Nostalgia is a necessary thing, I believe, and a way for all of us to find peace in that which we have accomplished, or even failed to accomplish. At the same time, if nostalgia precipitates actions to return to that fabled, rosy-painted time, particularly in one who believes his life to be a failure, then it is an empty thing, doomed to produce nothing but frustration and an even greater sense of failure.

For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up,’ there is always an edge of disbelief—how could they ever be other than what they are?

He no longer loves the person whom he loved ten years ago. I quite believe it. She is no longer the same, nor is he. He was young, and she also; she is quite different. He would perhaps love her yet, if she were what she was then.

I can't look at everything hard enough!

Any time gone by was better.

Theatres are curious places, magician's trick-boxes where the golden memories of dramtic triumphs linger like nostalgic ghosts, and where the unexplainable, the fantastic, the tragic, the comic and the absurd are routine occurences on and off the stage. Murders, mayhem, politcal intrigue, lucrative business, secret assignations, and of course, dinner.

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 the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. 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.

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 no remedy upon earth except as it is to be found in the enlightenment of the spirit--some ability to have a perceptive rather than an exploitive relationship with his fellow creatures.

The mid-19th century was noted for a partisan, rather than a consensus press, but this partisanship was able to turn out voters consistently.

Somewhere between buying 25 friendship bands and passing by the shop with a smile looking at kids buying the bands, we grew up

Those darling byegone times, Mr Carker,' said Cleopatra, 'with their delicious fortresses, and their dear old dungeons, and their delightful places of torture, and their romantic vengeances, and their picturesque assaults and sieges, and everything that makes life truly charming! How dreadfully we have degenerated!

The dreams of childhood—its airy fables; its graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond: so good to be believed-in once, so good to be remembered when outgrown, for the least among them rises to the stature of a great Charity in the heart, suffering the little children to come into the midst of it, and to keep with their pure hands a garden in the stony ways of this world

I visit you in my dreams and you talk to me in songs. Each sentence is a bridge taking me closer to the city that you are.

Freedom, "that terrible word inscribed on the chariot of the storm," is the motivating principle of all revolutions. Without it, justice seems inconceivable to the rebel's mind. There comes a time, however, when justice demands the suspension of freedom. Then terror, on a grand or small scale, makes its appearance to consummate the revolution. Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. But one day nostalgia takes up arms and assumes the responsibility of total guilt; in other words, adopts murder and violence.

Country life has its advantages,' he used to say. 'You sit on the veranda drinking tea and your ducklings swim on the pond, and everything smells good. . . and there are gooseberries.

I don’t have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They’re upstairs in my socks.

Sara," I ask finally, "what do you want from me?""I want to look at you and remember what it used to be like," she says thickly. "I want to go back, Brian. I want you to take me back."But she is not the woman I used to know, the woman who traveled a countryside counting prairie dog holes, who read aloud the classifieds of lonely cowboys seeking women and told me, in the darkest crease of the night, that she would love me until the moon lost its footing in the sky.To be fair, I am not the same man. The one who listened. The one who believed her.

Alecto, have you noticed how downhill this little island is becoming?” Mandy questioned sadly. “All these organic food stores and yoga studios and cellular phone towers… Cape Breton was one of the only places left where it still had that nostalgic small town atmosphere but now… I’ve only been away for a year, how could things have changed so quickly? I mean, how can the world accept it?”“C'est la vie,” said Alecto, looking extremely tired as he stared out the window at the late November maple keys fluttering down from vibrantly red trees lining the streets on either side of the windshield.

The courtyard kept changing, dazzling her with the flowers that bloomed between one day and the next, with the bare branches of trees that were swollen with the buds of new leaves and then fuzzed with green. Every day, she drove a familiar road through a new place.

Nobody has ever taken a photograph of something they want to forget. We can build a wall of happy Kodak moments around ourselves, a wall of our Christmases, birthdays, baby showers and weddings, but we can never forget that celluloid film is see-through, that behind it, all the misery of real life waits for our wall to collapse someday.

You'll live through my words and my pictures, and I'll live somewhere the skies are blue.

I love the smell of old books,” Mandy sighed, inhaling deeply with the book pressed against her face. The yellow pages smelled of wood and paper mills and mothballs.

I miss those days even though I wasn't alive.

Conversations were struck up between strangers, regular diners as well as infrequent customers, as if united by a sense of gratitude at the sheer unlikeliness of it all - a high achievement of industrial civilisation that deserved to remain for everyone, but which has now gone the way of the airship and the ocean liner. Much of the nostalgia concerning railways is partial, even false; not this.[On British railway dining cars]

Men always praise antiquity and fault the present, although not always reasonably, and they are partisans of things past such that not only do they celebrate those ages that they know from what historians have preserved of them, but also those that as old men they recall having seen in their youth. And if this opinion of theirs is false, as it is most of the time, I am persuaded that there are various causes that lead them into this deception.

I felt a tightening in my chest, a sharp spike of intense sadness-almost like nostalgia, except it was for a life I never had.

It partook ... of eternity ... there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.

This Heart at Peace is My Homeland. (Su Shih)

I was right when I said I’d never look back. It hurts too much, it drags at your heart till you can’t ever do anything else except look back.

It was nostalgic in that painful way nostalgia could be

Nostalgia can be more painful than a surgeon's knife.

This empty shell holds nothing but the echoes of what was.

...her own restless coveting of his love and the slow but sure ebullience of her desire for him; then the Nawab's martydom and her spiritual homelessness and physical loneliness; there was so much, so many portraits and landscapes, like the bright pages of an album of words and pictures. They filled her heart overflowing with the tangy, coppery taste of blood that flows from failure, and pricked her soul with nostalgia, for what was and what could have been. She had never thought that happy memories could come accompanied with so much regret, so much pain, so much repining, and discontent. If you plucked a rose without due care, its thorn pricked you to protest the thoughtlessness and the inconsiderateness you had displayed in taking away its crowning glory. Here, it was nothing else but the rose which was the thorn: its each and every petal was saturated with the scents of the past but it stung like the scorpion plant. But was it possible not to touch those memories? For their scents traveled in and out of your being like breath, and their colours were inside every blink of your eye.

We cannot escape the longing, no matter what life we choose. We’re either longing for people, places or times gone by, which are essentially the same things: memories. And, whether or not we travel, the older we get, the more memories we collect. Nostalgia is simply the result of aging and liking the life you’ve lived. Be happy you can feel it—it’s a good sign.

I get sentimental over the music of the ’90s. Deplorable, really. But I love it all. As far as I’m concerned the ’90s was the best era for music ever, even the stuff that I loathed at the time, even the stuff that gave me stomach cramps.

This mournful and restless sound was a fit accompaniment to my meditations.

He's rigged a tiny cassette player with a small set of foam earphones to listen to demo tapes and rough mixes. Occasionally he'll hand the device to Mindy, wanting her opinion, and each time, the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums - hers alone - is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage, as if she were looking back on this lark in Africa with Lou from some distant future.

Over-familiar, the music has become a kind of audio-Valium, background music rather than something I listen to actively and attentively. A gin and tonic after a long day. A shame, I think, because while each note remains the same, I used to hear them differently. It used to sound better.

This empty kitchen's whereI'd while away the hoursJust next to my old chairYou'd usually have some flowersThe shelves of booksEven the picture hooksEverything is goneBut my heart is hanging onIf this old neighborhoodSurvived us both alrightDon't know that it withstoodAll the things that took our lightYou on the stairI can see you thereEverything is goneBut my heart is hanging onOnce there was a little girlUsed to wonder what she would beWent out into the big wide worldNow she's just a memoryThere used to be a little school hereWhere I learned to write my nameBut time has been a little cruel hereTime has no shameIt's just a place whereWe used to liveIt's just a place whereWe used to liveNow in another townYou lead another lifeAnd now upstairs and downYou're someone else's wifeHere in the dustThere's not a trace of usEverything is goneBut my heart is hanging onIt's just a place whereWe used to liveIt's just a place whereWe used to live.

Mandy, I hardly think this was appropriate, not after… you know… after the funeral we haven’t had the money for any of your weird little games and I was hoping you’d be more mature now that Jud’s gone,” her father had disappointedly added. “How much’d that cake cost you?”“It’s paid for,” Mandy had argued, but her voice had sounded tiny in the harbour wind. “I used the cash from my summer job at Frenchy’s last year and I… it was my birthday, dad!”“You can’t even be normal about this one thing, can you?” her father had complained.Mandy hadn’t cried, she’d only stared back knowingly, her voice shaky. “…I’m normal.

I want to build / and raise anew / Theseus' Temple and the Stadiums / and where Pericles livedBut there's no money, too much spent today / I had a guest over and we sat together.

Once a thing is removed from your heart, a trace of it still remains.

I am filled time and againwith a heart-aching wonder when I thinkof the fireand frost of memoriesof the everlastingnessof lovethe solace of familyand the power of prayer.

I'm chasing a decade old ghost. Searching beneath the rafters of a cobweb-filled haven lined with old memories which my brain cannot accept are dead. The light of nostalgia is burning bright inside my heart. Ignoring the emptiness around me, and hoping for a resurrection of love.

Back in the "leather and lace" eighties, I was the fantasy editor for a publishing company in New York City. It was a great time to be young and footloose on the streets of Manhattan—punk rock and folk music were everywhere; Blondie, the Eurythmics, Cyndi Lauper, and Prince were all strutting their stuff on the newly created MTV; and the eighties' sense of style meant I could wear my scruffy black leather into the office without turning too many heads. The fantasy field was growing by leaps and bounds, and I was right in the middle of it, working with authors I'd worshiped as a teen, and finding new ones to encourage and publish.

Nostalgia has a way of blocking the reality of the past.

This is what I want. I want people to take care of me. I want them to force comfort upon me. I want the soft-pillow feeling that I associate with memories of being ill when I was younger, soft pillows and fresh linens and satin-edged blankets and hot chocolate. It's not so much the comfort itself as knowing there's someone who wants to take care of you.

People say that a time machine can’t be invented, but they’ve already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world’s first time machines.

we always knewthat good times camewith termination contractseven if we weren't quite readyto sign it.

They think I’m not entirely ‘grounded in reality’, they say. They want me to go to some live-in nerdy activity ranch thing for troubled Canadian youth, that one out in Ontario where you come back programmed like some robot, dressed in a tye-dyed shirt and eating tuna sandwiches,” Mandy explained, a horrified look on her face. “You’re eighteen, not twelve! Would they really send you to some rat’s nest like that?” Wendy questioned in mock horror. “Aw hell no, if you get sent there, they’ll make you hold hands and sing songs about caring! And they’ll force you to recycle everything in blue canisters, and to discuss your emotions in front of groups of bratty little dopes!”“Dear god, they’ll have geeky youth wiener roasts at night, and no locks on the doors!” Mandy added, eyes wide. “…It’ll be the day pigs fly, my parents have the camp brochure on the fridge but they’ll never go through with sending me there. They always forget.

The way you remember or dream about your loved ones - the ones who are gone - you can't stop their endings from jumping ahead of the rest of their stories. You don't get to choose the chronology of what you dream, or the order of events in which you remember someone. In your mind - in your dreams, in your memories - sometimes the story begins with the epilogue.

A picture's worth a thousand words. But a single word can make you think of over a thousand pictures in your mind, over a thousand moments, a thousand memories.

In her eyes was the reflection of everything that mattered: old diners with neon signs, vinyl records, celluloid film, drive-in movies, Pears soap, department stores, her brother’s old blue Camaro car and the smell of coal dust in the rainy sky of a summer lightning storm.…And all the nice bright colors of the past that she thought were gone for good came flowing back into her life like a wave of nostalgia flooding over her, reds, yellows, blues and greens drenching her gray memories in psychedelic ribbons and glittering fireworks.…She hoped that the world would always hold those miniscule yet beautiful, deep and mysterious traces of memory.

How promising today's generation is. They can whip out their cellular phones like sheep, instantly take a million digital photos of their cat and then just delete them. But I'd like to see these kids try to artfully use a traditional film camera or make a super 8 home movie. Traditional film takes integrity, nostalgia, effort, patience and imagination - things that the 21st century has very little of. Everything these days, even a superior medium like film photography with an extensively vivid history and an iconic meaning, is becoming disposable in this age.

…Maybe I’ll be watching super-8 home videos,” Alecto told her, smiling bleakly. “I love my super-8 camera, it’s an Eastman Kodak one… Kodak stopped manufacturing them, the world went digital and now Kodak has stopped making Kodachrome film and all kinds of traditional film products… it’s sad.” “Well, uh… well, have fun watching your home movies then,” Mandy finished, but she didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about.

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 of all the others just become ghosts.

That’s why all of those records from high school sound so good. It’s. It that the songs were better- it’s that we were listening to them with our friends, drunk for the first time on liqueurs, touching sweaty palms, staring for hours at a poster on the wall, not grossed out by carpet or dirt or crumpled, oily bedsheets. These songs and albums were the best ones because of how huge adolescence felt then, and how nostalgia recasts it now. Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like we’ve lived. To get a sense that we have already journeyed through something- survived it, experienced it- is often so much easier and less messy than the task of currently living though something. Though hard to grasp, nostalgia is elating to bask in- temporarily restoring color to the past. It creates a sense memory that momentarily simulates context. Nostalgia is recall without the criticism of the present day, all the good parts, memory without the pain. Finally, nostalgia asks so little of us, just to be noticed and revisited; it doesn’t require the difficult task of negotiation, the heartache and uncertainty that the present does.

I remember things like dates down to minutes, what they smelled like, how they walked and how they tug their hands in their pockets. I twine myself in nostalgia of moments and not necessarily the people in them. I long for the idea of the past and occasionally forget the present. I find myself lost in memories, just looking to recreate the moment; forgetting the past is in the past and what we have is now.

Three children lay on the rocks at the water's edge.A dark-haired girl, two boys, slightly older.This image is caught forever in my memory, like some fragile creature preserved in amber.

Growing up, I always had a soldier mentality. As a kid I wanted to be a soldier, a fighter pilot, a covert agent, professions that require a great deal of bravery and risk and putting oneself in grave danger in order to complete the mission. Even though I did not become all those things, and unless my predisposition, in its youngest years, already had me leaning towards them, the interest that was there still shaped my philosophies. To this day I honor risk and sacrifice for the good of others - my views on life and love are heavily influenced by this.

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

You. You are the last page of hundred pages I have written in my journal. Filling its pages with special kind of spoken words without a sound, and the I Love You that's been written and rewritten countless times. After all this time that I spent writing about you in my journals, can you still not understand? Only you can fill this quietness and emptiness, only you can take this grief away, isn't it obvious? Who else will save your soul and mine? God knows, it is you that will heal the holes and cracks of times.

The memories: they are the reality.

In short, the man displayed a constant and insurmountable impulse to wrap himself in a covering, to make himself, so to speak, a case which would isolate him and protect him from external influences. Reality irritated him, frightened him, kept him in continual agitation, and, perhaps to justify his timidity, his aversion for the actual, he always praised the past and what had never existed; and even the classical languages which he taught were in reality for him goloshes and umbrellas in which he sheltered himself from real life.

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, hesitant, and eager to confide so many uncertainties about herself could, with one and the same gesture, reach into my pants with unabashed recklessness and hold on to my cock and squeeze it.

Even the memory of cradling her in my arms is pure euphoria. And all that I ask out of life is that it be constant and unending euphoria.

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…

what it is is the memory of a dance a song you heard long ago to hear it is to be young again and for once for once you are happy

That's most interesting. But I was no more a mind-reader then than today. Iwas weeping for an altogether different reason. When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. Morescientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But aharsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could notremain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn't really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I've never forgotten.

The verbal patterns and the patterns of behavior we present to children in these lighthearted confections are likely to influence them for the rest of their lives. These aesthetic impressions, just like the moral teachings of early childhood, remain indelible.

Even when our children are still young and defenseless, we feel intimations of their departure. We find ourselves staring at them with nostalgia, wistful for the person they're about to no longer be.

What are you doing?” Alecto asked in surprise, stepping back. Laughing brightly, she dragged him towards the greenhouse, the shattered glass reflecting rainbows as brilliant as a million Kodak flashcubes, glittering as they were cascaded through the breeze. “See, don’t be afraid of the glass, it can’t hurt us,” Mandy laughed, spectacularly eccentric, her eyes reflecting the fallen glass.“I wasn’t afraid of the glass, but this isn’t a very secluded place that you just decided to vandalize,” Alecto cautioned, smiling despite his words. Before Mandy could reply, she heard loud whispering in the air, behind the trees… it sounded like a group of people, all whispering in unison… “Somebody’s out there,” she exclaimed nervously.“Yeah, you’re right,” Alecto replied. Suddenly a sharp new vibrancy seemed to fill his eyes and he smiled coldly, taking the tree branch from Mandy and rapidly smashing in all of Mrs. Matthias’ stained glass house windows with it. Blue, green, yellow, red, turquoise, purple and an array of other colors showered through the sky noisily, sounding like wind chimes and crashing waves. “They’ll go away,” he told her, glancing up at the sky.“…Alecto, do you like me?” Mandy questioned, holding out her arms like a lopsided scarecrow as the glass fell through her dark red hair.“Yeah, sure,” he answered.“Will you be my friend, then? A real friend, not just another person who feels sorry for me?” Mandy asked.“…Alright, Mandy Valems,” Alecto agreed.

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 on the boardwalk with Jud and Wendy, buying rainbow sorbet from the ice cream shop and placing paper boats into the harbour. She felt like a ghost, drifting past the shell of her own childhood.

Alecto isn't a person! He's just something that society made and then threw away, a memory that refuses to die.

When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago--and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail--it's disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you do. It's astonishing to consider all the things from your past that used to happen all the time but (a) never happen anymore, and (b) never even cross your mind. It's almost like those things didn't happen. Or maybe it seems like they just happened to someone else. To someone you don't really know. To someone you just hung out with for one night, and now you can't even remember her name.

Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like we've lived. To get a sense that we have already journeyed through something - survived it, experienced it - is often so much easier and less messy than the task of currently living through something.

I never even heard her voice."And after a while:"It is a strange grief."Softly:"To die of nostalgia for something you never lived.

She felt the intimate loss of who she was meant to become.

He looked at me, that first day, like he had just found something he’d lost a thousand years ago.

I go backwards and forwards, recapturing the past, wondering about the future—and, most unreasonably, I find myself longing for the past more than for the future.

One thing seems certain. Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life—a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin.It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the sombre hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of colour and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in the trillions.They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.

We cannot turn back the clock and relive cherished pastimes. We move beyond our origins. A person must make their way in an evolving social, political, and economic world order. We must not be too quick writing off the influence of our prior experiences, because the long tentacles the past remain vibrant strands within us. While the past does not cast our future in stone, its durable mold shapes our present. The ingrained strumming of our personal histories, sentimental or otherwise, also portents what might come along in our future.

Sometimes, without effort, you live in the moment. You don't regret the past or worry about the future, and in that moment everything flashes before your eyes , a clear snapshot of what has to be done, and everything pauses.

There's no reason that anything should ever become obsolete, whether it be VHS tapes, celluloid film, print books or even the previous versions of a computer operating system, as long as even just one person still wants them around. After all, one thing leads to another, old inventions are the basis for new ones, inventors and designers and scientists and hobbyists worked hard to create all these things, so don't they deserve some respect, enough not to have their ideas buried in the dust by the latest trends and fads?

Oftentimes she wondered what had happened to super 8. Sure, it made perfect sense that nobody wanted the hassle of spending money on a three-minute cartridge of film and threading it through a projector, but though digital cameras were convenient and cheap, Mandy didn’t care. Super 8 had integrity, it wasn’t just nostalgia, it was art, it was history, it was a little recording medium that somehow possessed the power to evoke lost memories, to turn back time, and there was something dazzling about waiting excitedly for a reel of film to come back in its yellow and red Kodak envelope, eating buttered popcorn while the projector paraded life’s best moments, and capturing something beautiful in only three minutes.

LED lighting has its place: cold, detached, hollow places like office buildings, factories, fast food chains and public schools - places full of humans but no human emotions. LED lighting really belongs in the apathy of the digital age, where science and technology rules over friendship, love and freedom. Incandescent light bulbs have a warm yellow-orange glow like the glow of a nice fireplace, where friends and family might sit and talk together or where children might open Christmas presents, a glow that can project celluloid films and bring back old memories, a glow that can light the text of a paperback novel. Something that beautiful, with that much power, could never last very long in a time as depressing and uncertain as the 21st century.

We make, see, and love films, not digitals. To convert all of our movies, home videos, theaters, photographs and television to digital would be like telling a painter to throw away his brushes and canvas for an I-Pad. Celluloid isn't just nostalgic, it's an art form and, like it or not, it's superior to digital. It lasts much longer, it provides grain and brighter colors, and it takes more effort so that it produces something wonderful. With the inferior binary codes, pixels and untested shelf-life of digital files, plus the fact that these days anyone with a digital camera, even a two-year-old, can make a video and pollute the world with self-photography and cat pictures, film has a lot more integrity and worth than digital.

Film photography will always be superior to digital - because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels you've got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and meaning than one a built-in robot took.

We were poor back then. Not living in a cardboard carton poor, not “we might have to eat the dog” poor, but still poor. Poor like, no insurance poor, and going to McDonald's was a really big excitement poor, wearing socks for gloves in the winter poor, and collecting nickels and dimes from the washing machine because she never got allowance, that kind of poor… poor enough to be nostalgic about poverty. So, when my mom and dad took me here for my tenth birthday, it was a really big deal. They’d saved up for two months to take me to the photography store and they bought me a Kodak Instamatic film camera… I really miss those days, because we were still a real family back then… this mall doesn’t even have a film photography store anymore, just a cell phone and digital camera store, it’s depressing…

To be honest, I’ve always made films and I never really stopped, starting with little stop-motion experiments using my dad’s Super 8 camera. In my mind, it’s all one big continuum of filmmaking and I’ve never changed.

I grew up in an era that was a golden age of the blockbuster, when something we might call a family film could have universal appeal. That's something I want to see again. In terms of the tone of the film, it looks at where we are as a people and has a universality about human experience.

The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future. It's depressing if you spend too much time reliving old joys. You think you'll never have anything as good again.

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 so, what remained was to free myself from the prospect of the future.("The Tower")

I'm not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they're going to do. I'm just going to do it. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.

Kodachrome... it gives us those nice, bright colors,gives us the greens of summers,makes ya think all the world's a sunny day,Oh yeah!I've got a Nikon camera, I'd love to take a photograph,so mama don't take...my Kodachrome away...

There comes a time in your life, when you are left with too many yesterdays and very less tomorrows. When you can look back and relive all the golden moments of your life. You would laugh thinking about your graduation day, or the teacher who changed your life, or how you met your soulmate. But then, you look ahead and you would realize that there is no future – no tomorrow to look forward to, and nothing to plan. Then what would you do? How would you go on and live a future that doesn't exist?

It wasn't that I wanted to know her now. I wanted to have already known her. I wanted her fears and her desires to have shaped my life. I know this is not love, of course. What it is is a queer feeling of nostalgia for an impossible future, for what can never be. That's fantasy. Love is different.

A vision of the little house in Soho flickered across his mind’s eye, his mother at a desk, writing in her journal, with hazy sunlight streaming through the morning windows. The woman inhabited a world he had once thought his own – a world of publishers and reliable suppliers. A London that was confident and competent amid its grey, puddle-strewn streets.

I have always lusted after a sepia-toned library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a sliding ladder. I fantasie about Tennessee Williams' types of evenings involving rum on the porch. I long for balmy slightly sleepless nights with nothing but the whoosh of a wooden ceiling fan to keep me company, and the joy of finding the cool spot on the bed. I would while away my days jotting down my thoughts in a battered leather-bound notebook, which would have been given to me by some former lover. My scribbling would form the basis of a best-selling novel, which they wold discuss in tiny independent bookshops on quaint little streets in forgotten corners of terribly romantic European cities. In other words, I fantasize about being credible, in that artistic, slightly bohemian way that only girls with very long legs can get away with.

We men of this age are rotten with book-lore and with a yearning for the past.

Kipster is a perfectly valid word,” Wendy argued, about to write down her score on the little notepad that had come with the game. “Okay, so what does it mean?” Mandy wanted to know. Wendy struggled to come up with an answer, and finally just changed the subject with school gossip. Mandy found herself just ignoring it… it always sounded the same, the same events, same rumors, same secrets, same affairs, but never anything of interest to her.“Well Sarah’s on drugs again and that’s why she did it in Mario’s backseat, but now she might be pregnant, oh, and that messed-up Seth kid’s been cutting himself again so he was sent away to Halifax last week, and there’s a festival in Wolfville but Kathy won’t go because Audrey-Rose is going to be there and they hate each other, and….”Mandy had learned two years ago to detach herself from gossip; she’d learned it from Jud’s death. Wendy may have been eighteen years old but she could be immature on the best of days.

There are the girls we love, the men we look up to, the tenderness, the friendships, the opportunities, the pleasures! But the fact remains that you must touch your reward with clean hands, lest it turn to dead leaves, to thorns, in your grasp.

…Do you think there’s somewhere else, some other place to go after this one?” Mandy blurted out.“You mean when you die, where will you end up?” Alecto asked her. “…I wouldn’t know… back to whatever void there is, I suppose.”“I’ve thought about it… every living thing dies alone, it’ll be lonely after death,” Mandy sighed sadly. “That freaks me out, does it scare you?”“I don't want to be alone,” Alecto replied wearily. “We won’t be, though. We’ll be dead, so we’ll just be darkness, not much else, just memories, nostalgia and darkness.”“I don’t want to be any of that either though,” Mandy exclaimed, bursting into tears and crying, keeping her eyes to the floor, her voice shaky as she spoke to him. “When we die, we’ll still be nothing, the world will still be nothing, everything’ll just be nothing!”“You’re real though, at least that’s something,” Alecto pointed out, holding his hand out in front of her. Smiling miserably, Mandy took his hand in her own and sat there beside him quietly.

However vivid they might be, past images and future delights did not protect Sylvia from the present, which "rules despotic over pale shadows of past and future". That was Sylvia's genius and her Panic Bird- her total lack of nostalgia. She had no armor. This left her especially vulnerable in New York, where she was removed from the context of her life, severed from that reassuring arc.

Nostalgia was diagnosed [as a medical illness] at a time when art and science had not yet entirely severed their umbilical ties and when the mind and body internal and external well-being were treated together...Our progeny well might poeticize depression and see it as a global atmospheric condition, immune to treatment with Prozac.

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 can stop a revolving planet? Who can predict where on the table a spinning quarter will fall flat?

Have You Prayed” When the windturns and asks, in my father’s voice,Have you prayed?I know three things. One:I’m never finished answering to the dead.Two: A man is four winds and three fires.And the four winds are his father’s voice,his mother’s voice . . .Or maybe he’s seven winds and ten fires.And the fires are seeing, hearing, touching,dreaming, thinking . . .Or is he the breath of God?When the wind turns travelerand asks, in my father’s voice, Have you prayed?I remember three things.One: A father’s loveis milk and sugar,two-thirds worry, two-thirds grief, and what’s left overis trimmed and leavened to make the breadthe dead and the living share.And patience? That’s to endurethe terrible leavening and kneading.And wisdom? That’s my father’s face in sleep.When the windasks, Have you prayed?I know it’s only mereminding myselfa flower is one station betweenearth’s wish and earth’s rapture, and bloodwas fire, salt, and breath long beforeit quickened any wand or branch, any limbthat woke speaking. It’s just mein the gowns of the wind,or my father through me, asking,Have you found your refuge yet?asking, Are you happy?Strange. A troubled father. A happy son.The wind with a voice. And me talking to no one.

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 trusting each other for a change. And so we hunted, and sang, and laughed, and told heavily edited stories of the good old days, while each of us watched the other and wondered when the knife would fall.

Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as as I start to run?

Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as I start to run?

It tugs at me, filling me with the kind of seasick nostalgia that can hit you in the gut when you find an old concert ticket in your purse or an old coin machine ring you got down at the boardwalk on a day when you went searching for mermaids in the surf with your best friend.That punch of nostalgia hits me now and I start to sink down on the sky-coloured quilt, feeling the nubby fabric under my fingers, familiar as the topography of my hand.

I'll remember you... I remember everyone I've lost.

This is my home, Cape Breton is my home, and I don’t know if I really want to leave it as much as I might think and I’m sort of scared to leave it all behind, everything I’ve lived with, I have so many memories of all the things I’ve done here and I’m afraid if I leave, I might lose all my memories…

You’re innocent until proven guilty,” Mandy exclaimed, unable to hide her gleeful smile. She missed the way people used to have normal conversations, used to be more caring for each other than themselves, back in the Seventies and Eighties. These days, she realized, neighbors kept to themselves, their kids kept to themselves, nobody talked to each other anymore. They went to work, went shopping and shut themselves up at home in front of glowing computer screens and cellphones… but maybe the nostalgic, better times in her life would stay buried, maybe the world would never be what it was. In the 21st century music was bad, movies were bad, society was failing and there were very few intelligent people left who missed the way things used to be… maybe though, Mandy could change things. Thinking back to the old home movies in her basement, she recalled what Alecto had told her. “We wanted more than anything else in the world to be normal, but we failed.” The 1960’s and 1970’s were very strange times, but Mandy missed it all, she missed the days when Super-8 was the popular film type, when music had lyrics that made you think, when movies had powerful meanings instead of bad comedy and when people would just walk to a friend’s house for the afternoon instead of texting in bed all day. She missed soda fountains and department stores and non-biodegradable plastic grocery bags, she wished cellphones, bad pop music and LED lights didn’t exist… she hated how everything had a diagnosis or pill now, how people who didn’t fit in with modern, lazy society were just prescribed medications without a second thought… she hated how old, reliable cars were replaced with cheap hybrid vehicles… she hated how everything could be done online, so that people could just ignore each other… the world was becoming much more convenient, but at the same time, less human, and her teenage life was considered nostalgic history now.Hanging her head low, avoiding the slightly confused stare of the cab driver through the rear view mirror, she started crying uncontrollably, her tears soaking the collar of her coat as the sun blared through the windows in a warm light.

Why’d you want to kill yourself? Didn’t you feel anything, or didn’t it hurt you?” Mandy questioned, looking puzzled. “Yes, I suppose it did, … it was strange, it was sharp, that’s all I can think of to describe it… and cold, but not cold like ice, more like… I don’t know, like something much worse, something horrible… and it seemed like the ground was falling upwards, becoming the sky… for a moment it made me consider that it was just a dream, that I was on some sort of drug, and then I remember being overjoyed to see the sky was still above me, then just really sad, really tired… and then I don’t remember much else about it,” Alecto told her, glaring straight ahead at the sky with narrowed eyes. “I don’t mind, I’m not supposed to mind, anyway. Mearth already told me that eventually I would want to be dead, that it was inevitable… still, I sometimes wish that I could have done something good for other people in my life, it might have made up for all the bad stuff I’ve done.

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 no matter how late it was."I'm here," his voice echoed back. "Trouble sleeping again?""Yeah.""Another bad dream?""Uh-huh," she sniffed, unexpected tears flooding her eyes. My dad was calling for me, but I couldn't find him." She couldn't believe she'd said it. She'd never told anyone what she saw in her dreams. But Jeeter understood. He'd told her before that he had bad dreams too, since his mom had died.

...the nostalgia for things that weren't yet lost.

The vivid memory of the woods had blossomed into a visceral longing for the Ridge, so immediate that I felt the ghost of my vanished house rise around me, a cold mountain wind thrumming past its walls, and thought that, if I reached down, I could feel Adso's soft gray fur under my fingers. I swallowed, hard.

The scene sucker-punched Max. He never saw it coming. It encapsulated in one poignant instant the tragic beauty of his family history.

I would never see her again, except in memory. She was here, and now she's gone. There is no middle ground. Probably is a word that you may find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.

I think that's what people do with the holidays. They wrap it up all neatly with a turkey and clever gifts and lots of eggnog and laugh and laugh, but at the end of the day there are always people missing from the table. And you have to either sit with those empty chairs and laugh, or you can choose not to come to the table at all. I would rather come to the table.

Creosote made Mandy think of the thrill of rushing through a garden sprinkler as a kid, of playing washer toss in the backyard, of spending nights in the neighbors’ huge in-ground swimming pool when she was twelve, throwing glow sticks in the turquoise water during Canada Day block parties. She thought of Jud for a moment, how he’d loved doing all those things when he was a kid, but how, as he got older, it was all about popularity, sports, a life of illusion… and without warning, a totally different kind of memory filled her mind – the dull feeling of her head hitting the concrete walls near the wood shop at her old high school, the sounds of kids laughing, the sharp smell of sawdust, the buzzing of electric sanders nearby, the sound of Jud laughing while he beat her up… without realizing it, she’d started crying noiselessly.

There was a super-8 steel town somewhere, where all the forgotten things in the cruel world ended up eventually, Mandy was sure of it… this place, she decided, was called Smog City.

Anna drove with the window rolled down, breathing in the essence of autumn: an exhalation of a forest readying itself for sleep, a smell so redolent with nostalgia a pleasant ache warmed her bones and she was nagged with the sense of a loss she could not remember.

She walked down the lawn and surveyed the world as they'd both seen it--the wild limbs of the leaning apple tree, the golden-brown evening sky, the black silhouettes of the mountains. The trunk and the branches of the tree had bent over the years, under the weight of the heavy fruit. One of the biggest branches had grown down from the canopy of the leaves, all the way to the ground and straight along the grass...the end of that same branch had begun growing up again, at a right angle, the wood bending toward the sky.

At least I rescued your poor hot dog.

She should have died on that day. Perhaps, in a way, she had.

And that's my problem. I love to be alone and hate being around people, but I love to be with people and hate being alone. I don't know what I like and I don't know what I want. Time is a difficult thing. It moves too slowly and speeds up when you finally wish it would slow down or stop. You get to the aftermath and all you have are your memories. Precious memories. The kind that make you smile and laugh like you're living it again, while a nostalgic tear falls. And then another. And then another, until you want to just forget it all to stop the painfully happy memories because at the end of the day, those - not the sad ones - are the memories that hurt us most.

I nodded, trying to imagine the very particular sadness of a vanished childhood yogurt now found only in France. It was a very special sort of sadness, individual, and in its inability to induce sympathy, in its tuneless spark, it bypassed poetry and entered science.

–We are all dying– she told me. –Even something of the immortal will die–“What?”–Meaning–

And in an essential way, this was what he was most ashamed of: not his poor understanding of sex, not his traitorous racial tendencies, not his inability to separate himself from his parents or make his own money or behave like an autonomous creature. It was that, when he and his colleagues sat there at night, the group of them burrowed deep into their own ambitious dream-structures, all of them drawing and planning their improbable buildings, he was doing nothing. He had lost the ability to imagine anything. And so every evening, while the others created, he copied: he drew buildings he had seen on his travels, buildings other people had dreamed and constructed, buildings he had lived in or passed through. Again and again, he made what had already been made, not bothering to improve them, just mimicking them. He was twenty-eight; his imagination had deserted him; he was a copyist.It frightened him. JB had his series. Jude had his work, Willem had his. But what if Malcolm never again created anything? He longed for the years when it was enough to simply be in his room with his hand moving over a piece of graph paper, before the years of decisions and identities, when his parents made his choices for him, and the only thing he had to concentrate on was the clean blade stroke of a line, the ruler's perfect knife edge.

I may be a little like the grown-ups. I must have grown old.

Hey presto: time travel. You don't need a time machine, it turns out, you just need a friend to laugh like a teenager. Chronology shivers.

It's like a blueberry White Russian,' John said, now on his third spoonful.'It tastes exactly the same,' Mike said, his teeth already bright blue.'No, no, it tastes better,' John said. 'I feel like it's making me stronger.

When I was in junior high school, I used to think that Disney's 1990's paranormal television program 'So Weird' was every kid's ideal life - not going to school, living on a tour bus, having rockstar parents, traveling all over North America and never staying in one place for more than a week or so. Of course, eventually the realization hits you that the kids out there who really do live like this, pulling up stakes every week and never staying with their friends or having a permanent residence, aren't really happy.

It struck her how sad it was that all of them had grown up on top of one another like small animals in a too-small cage, and now would simply scatter. And that would be the end of that. Everything that had happened would be sucked away into memory and vapour, as though it hadn't even happened at all.

Useless to tell myself that a dreamand the memory of yesterday are the same thing

His eyesight was possessed by the colours of trauma, cracking and bubbling like an old Super Eight film to remind him of his near-death drowning some two months ago in that very moment when he needed to act.

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures.

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.

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

I'd trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday.

Memory believes before knowing remembers.[Light in August]

Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.

And so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.

She knew with suddeness and ease that this moment would be with her always, within hand's reach of memory.She doubted if they all sensed it - they had seen the world - but even George was silent for a minute as they looked, and the scene, the smell, even the sound of the band playing a faintly recognisable movie theme, was locked forever in her, and she was at peace.

In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.

For sailors who love the wind, memory is a good port of departure.

I can tell you this: there will be other girls, other disasters. And there will be nights to come, his life mostly behind him, when he will long to hurt like that again.

A person in her twenties has been a child for most of her life, but as time goes by that portion that is childhood becomes smaller and smaller, more and more distant, more and more faded, though they say at the end of life the beginning returns with renewed vividness, as though you had sailed all the way around the world and were going back into the darkness from which you came.

When I first began to write, I had been a child for most of my life, and my childhood memories were vivid and potent, and the forces that shaped me, Most of them have grown fainter with time, and whenever I write one down, I give it away: it ceases to have the shadowy life of memory and becomes fixed in letters: it ceases to be mine; it loses that mobile unreliability of the live.

Then he remembered his wedding, the old times, the first pregnancy of his wife; he, too, had been very happy the day when he had taken her from her father to his home, and had carried her off on a pillion, trotting through the snow, for it was near Christmas-time, and the country was all white. She held him by one arm, her basket hanging from the other; the wind blew the long lace of her Cauchois headdress so that it sometimes flapped across his mouth, and when he turned his head he saw near him, on his shoulder, her little rosy face, smiling silently under the gold bands of her cap. To warm her hands she put them from time to time in his breast. How long ago it all was! Their son would have been thirty by now. Then he looked back and saw nothing on the road.

Sometimes the good memories are just as painful as the bad ones.

He knew very well that his memory detested him, that it did nothing but slander him; therefore he tried not to believe it and to be more lenient toward his own life. But that didn't help: he took no pleasure in looking back, and he did it as seldom as possible.

A lifetime of memories does not provide empirical proof of the value of living. No one memory has a quantifiable value to anyone expect the holder of the memory. Parenting in large part consists of creating positive memories for children. An accumulation of a lifetime of memories does create a musical score that we can assess from an artistic if not scientific perspective. Each happy memory generates a beat of minor joy that when strung together form the musical notes demarking a person’s prosodic inner tune.

He’s completely blown through his younger years like his childhood was one big cigarette to smoke carelessly.

Their house was about a mile outside of town. The kids would play outdoors, in the backyard and the large stubble field behind the house. Dusk seemed to last for hours, and when it was finally dark they would sit under the porch light, catching thickly buzzing June bugs and moths, or even an occasional toad who hopped into the circle of light, tempted by the halo of insects that floated around the bare orange lightbulb next to the front door

I'd seen old Yardley Slickers- the makeup now just a waxy crumble- sell for almost one hundred dollars on the internet. So grown women could smell it again, that chemical, flowery fug. That's how badly people wanted it- to know that their lives had happened, that the person they once had been, still existed inside of them. There were so many things that returned me. The tang of soy, the smoke in someone's hair, the grassy hills turning blond in June. An arrangement of oaks and boulders could, seen out of the corner of my eye, crack open something in my chest, palms going suddenly slick with adrenaline.

She dug into one of the boxes, finding clay angels she’d made in art class when she was seven years old. She found plastic swans on strings and red crystal cardinals. She found a blue-and-white rocking horse covered in glitter. She found a porcelain Santa Claus. She found that she couldn’t figure out where the hell time had gone.

If we could imagine, while we live them, to what mundane moments nostalgia manages to stick itself...

That's the life, she said to me, as we watched a puppy chase its own tail. That's what I want to be next.I had laughed. you would wind up as a cat, I told her. They don't need anyone else.I need you, she replied.Well, I said. Maybe I'll come back as catnip.

The uncertainty of the future made them turn their hearts toward the past. They saw themselves in the lost paradise of the deluge, splashing in the puddles in the courtyard, killing lizards to hang on Úrsula, pretending that they were going to bury her alive, and those memories revealed to them the truth that they had been happy together ever since they had had memory.

Nostalgia... the blessing of a merciful memory.

Home is a desk. The amalgamation of a dream. Home is the cats, my books, and my work never done. All the lost things that may one day call to me, the faces of my children who will one day call to me. Maybe we can't draw flesh from reverie nor retrieve a dusty spur, but we can gather the dream itself and bring it back uniquely whole.

The print was an old one made from a negative taken in the 1960’s of her parents in Sydney Mines, dancing with thrilled, excited expressions on their faces, in front of a classic car that had been a wedding gift at the time. Her mother’s hair, red back then, was held back by a blue handkerchief, and she was dressed in a billowing skirt and white blouse. Her father’s denim jeans and faded t-shirt were streaked with coal dust as he held her hands and spun her around in the front yard of their old clapboard house, yellow grass under their feet and a cobalt-blue sky with white clouds drifting above. Mandy could almost feel the late summer breeze as she gazed deeply into the print, watching the flamboyant colors come to life. She hung it up to dry on two wooden clothespins hanging from a string above her.

We paw at nostalgia even before we hit twenty, wanting a holiday that never happened, a wholesomeness that could not survive in the wild.

I remembered his laugh, like a flock of crows taking off

Every day it’s something worse being predicted. Mearth says that sooner or later copyright on books will be all in the past because they’ll all be available electronically. She says that electric cars will replace gasoline-powered cars. She says that something called drones will be used to watch the entire country, she talks a lot about something called nanotechnology, and 3-dimensional printing and cellular phones being implanted into peoples’ minds and all available careers being replaced by robots and human cloning and overpopulation and film becoming obsolete, cellular phones making regular telephones obsolete and LED lighting replacing everything and eventually she says that the planet will collapse and become an apathetic wreck,” Alecto replied rapidly, his run-on sentence sounding sinister and dangerous. “Mearth says that eventually people will be able to see inside the minds of everyone.

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.

Bad days my memory functions no better than an out-of-focus kaleidoscope, but other days me recall is painfully perfect.

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 back, taunting her with what she left behind, knowing she can never recapture what's gone.

The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it. This pronouncement seems to state the obvious and yet it is false. Men grow old, the end grows near, each moment becomes more and more valuable and there is no time to waste on recollection. It's important to understand the mathematical paradox in nostalgia, that it is most powerful in early youth , when the volume of life that has passed is quite small.

There is a point in the future where even the worst disaster starts to settle into an anecdote.

The path of memory is neither straight or safe, and we travel down it at our risk.

Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.

Because who can describe the look that triggers the memory of loved ones? Who can anticipate the frown, the smile, or the misplaced lock of hair that sends a swift, undeniable signal from the past? Who can ever estimate the power of association, which is always strongest in moments of love and in memories of death?

Ever poised on that cusp between past and future, we tie memories to souvenirs like string to trees along life’s path, marking the trail in case we lose ourselves around a bend of tomorrow’s road.

Have you ever been homesick for someplace that doesn'tactually exist anymore? Someplace that exists only in yourmind?

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 important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?

Gonzaga was the kind of place you’d not even think about loving until you’d left it for a couple of years.

She could sense it very clearly: for me, no less than for her, the past counted far more than the present, remembering something far more than possessing it. Compared to memory, every possession can only ever seem disappointing, banal, inadequate ... She understood me so well! My anxiety that the present 'immediately' turned into the past so that I could love it and dream about it at leisure was just like hers, was identical. It was 'our' vice, this: to go forwards with our heads forever turned back.

As we age we begin to grasp at youthful bliss like a life raft in a sea of harsh reality.

I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.

We are so afraid of being pulled under the water with the anchor. Scared of letting these memories swirl around our mind as they should. As tragic as it might feel, it’s evident that the sea we are drowning in is the same sea we were born into.

[“What is the most real thing you can think of?”]Jacques thought for a long time before answering; he tried to weigh up what was most vital and enduring in all that he had known. Eventually, no longer smiling, he said, ‘Memory’.

It would be one hell of an addition to someone's scrapbook. (Dark City Lights)

There are photographs of people you don't recognize and photographs of you in ways you don't wish to be remembered, but they each contain elements of places or times you do not wish to forget.

There are so few people left alive from back then, you may as well be talking to them about the Black Death. Nobody recalls the shite in the 30s and that were fucking horrible. For Christ's sake, nobody wants to remember the shite in the 80s. It's all forgotten and swept under the rug by the newspapers and the BBC. They get nostalgic about the music, but they never want to mention the misery. It's all shite. As for the bloody Second World War, the politicians only talk about it when they need an excuse to go pissing about in one of those fucking Muslim countries.

You scour these Chinatowns of the mind, translating themlike sutras Xuan Zhang fetched from India, testing waysreturn might be possible against these homesick inventions, trace the traveller's alien steps across borders, and in between discover how transit has a way of lasting, the way these Chinatowns grew out of not knowing whether to return or to stay, and then became home.

Why could this darkness rip the gloominess around meHad an unknown reason of being fearful for so longThinking, if its touched by these horrendous windsWill unleash my sorrowful side & my mood swings!Aesthetically pleasing it is now, Couldn't yearn for it to be any betterThis oasis of serenity though, I trust will cast away all my darkness & dust!

It seemed like it was always autumn in this field - it was fitting really. Everything was shaded with the bronzes and yellows of faded pictures from an old photo album, it was a realm where uncomfortable nostalgia reigned. I noticed it more after my experience in the dream. There I was an actor in the play, here I was a spectator.

Nothing brings home closer than going home...

...and should I die in her care, I would leave smiling because, I will linger in the hills beside her...

In the evening, the tarantella dancers will come to the hotel; perhaps they'll dance and sing in the courtyard that is dripping with wistaria blooms and pungent with citrus perfumes. They wear gay costumes, these who sing and dance for us to keep alive the romance of other days; and they are full of that joy in living which seems the gift of these siren shores.

I know what it feels like, and it sucks, it really does, when you are up in the middle of the night thinking about the things that you've suddenly became aware of. The things you're missing out on right now, and all the people who are not close to you anymore, and all of the good times that will never happen again, and all the people who have meant the world to you who have forgotten about you forever, and you get this awful feeling that's kind of like a mix between loneliness and nostalgia.

Yes it’s me, I myself, what I turned out to be, (…) I’m the one here in myself, it’s me. (…) Whatever I was, whatever I wasn’t—it’s all in what I am. Whatever I wanted, whatever I didn’t want—all of this has shaped me. Whatever I loved, or stopped loving—in me it’s the same nostalgia (Álvaro de Campos)

When he stepped into the shower, the hot water scalded him. He let it run over his face, burning his eyelids. He put up with the pain, his jaw clenched and his muscles taut, suppressing the urge to howl with loneliness in the suffocating steam. For four years, one month, and twelve days, Nikon always got into the shower with him after they made love and soaped his back slowly, interminably. And often she put her arms around him, like a little girl in the rain. One day I'll leave without ever really knowing you. You'll remember my big, dark eyes. The reproachful silences. The moans of anxiety as I slept. The nightmares you couldn't save me from. You'll remember all this when I'm gone.

When he stepped into the shower, the hit water scalded him. He let it run over his face, burning his eyelids. He put up with the pain, his jaw clenched and his muscles taut, suppressing the urge to howl with loneliness in the suffocating steam. For four years, one month, and twelve days, Nikon always got into the shower with him after they made love and soaped his back slowly, interminably. And often she put her arms around him, like a little girl in the rain. One day I'll leave without ever really knowing you. You'll remember my big, dark eyes. The reproachful silences. The moans of anxiety as I slept. The nightmares you couldn't save me from. You'll remember all this when I'm gone.

Nos·tal·gia (n):A feeling that lingers long after the taste is gone.

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

The 'what should be' never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no 'what should be,' there is only what is.

Haven't you noticed, too, on the part of nearly everyone you know, a growing rebellion against the present? And an increasing longing for the past? I have. Never before in all my long life have I heard so many people wish that they lived 'at the turn of the century,' or 'when life was simpler,' or 'worth living,' or 'when you could bring children into the world and count on the future,' or simply 'in the good old days.' People didn't talk that way when I was young! The present was a glorious time! But they talk that way now. For the first time in man's history, man is desperate to escape the present. Our newsstands are jammed with escape literature, the very name of which is significant. Entire magazines are devoted to fantastic stories of escape - to other times, past and future, to other worlds and planets - escape to anywhere but here and now. Even our larger magazines, book publishers and Hollywood are beginning to meet the rising demand for this kind of escape. Yes, there is a craving in the world like a thirst, a terrible mass pressure that you can almost feel, of millions of minds struggling against the barriers of time. I am utterly convinced that this terrible mass pressure of millions of minds is already, slightly but definitely, affecting time itself. In the moments when this happens - when the almost universal longing to escape is greatest - my incidents occur. Man is disturbing the clock of time, and I am afraid it will break. When it does, I leave to your imagination the last few hours of madness that will be left to us; all the countless moments that now make up our lives suddenly ripped apart and chaotically tangled in time.Well, I have lived most of my life; I can be robbed of only a few more years. But it seems too bad - this universal craving to escape what could be a rich, productive, happy world. We live on a planet well able to provide a decent life for every soul on it, which is all ninety-nine of a hundred human beings ask. Why in the world can't we have it? ("I'm Scared")

I find myself becoming increasingly nostalgic for the past, but after all I suppose that is the only thing one can be nostalgic about.

Nostalgia is your brain's way of photoshopping the blemishes of your past

The terrible thing is that it's impossible to tear the past out by the roots.

Nostalgia is your brain's way of photoshopping the blemishes of your past.

Sweet as the past may be, it best remains pressed between the pages of memory, savoured for a moment or two on quiet Sunday afternoons.

Nostalgia is powerful. It is natural, human to long for the past, particularly when we can remember our histories as better than they were.

The past will disappear if we forget we existed".

I have to tell you about these things from the past, because they are so important. The really important things usually lie in the distant past. And until you know about them, if you'll forgive my saying so, you will always to some extent a mere newcomer in my life.When I was at High School my favourite pastime was walking. Or rather, loitering. If we are talking about my adolescence, it's the more accurate word. Systematically, one by one, I explored all the districts of Pest. I relished the special atmosphere of every quarter and every street. Even now I can still find the same delight in houses that I did then. In this respect I've never grown up. Houses have so much to say to me. For me, they are what Nature used to be to the poets - or rather, what the poets thought of as Nature.But best of all I loved the Castle Hill District of Buda. I never tired of its ancient streets. Even in those days old things attracted me more than new ones. For me the deepest truth was found only in things suffused with the lives of many generations, which hold the past as permanently as mason Kelemen's wife buried in the high tower of Deva.

There’s a ghost of a dream that you don’t even try to shake free off because you’re too in love with the way she haunts you.

It’s not a crime to wish for other worlds. You’ll get taxed for it but they can’t throw you in jail for creating your own private world…yet. Dramatics are fun, an indulgence. ‘You can’t go backward,’ ‘You can’t live in the past,’ they tell you. Why not? ‘You’ve got to put all that behind you and move on to other things,’ they say. Bullshit! These are all expressions of modern disposability. It’s a mediocritizing technique—trying to get rid of what I call ‘past orthodoxies.’ It’s our past that makes us unique, therefore it’s our past that economic interests want to rob from us, so they can sell us a new, improved future. Society now depends on a disposable world—out with the old, in with the new, including relationships. But how we weep and wish we could hold onto those cherished moments forever, to those long-whispered dreams, those tortured nights—how we want to grasp them and stop them from sifting through our fingers. I say, ‘Don’t let it happen. Keep things the way you want them and let the rest of the world be duped.

The danger of restorative nostalgia lies in its belief that the mutilated 'wholeness' of the body politic can be repaired. But the reflective nostalgic understands deep down that loss is irrecoverable: Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world. In pop terms, Morrissey is the supreme poet of reflective nostalgia.

Lewis had experienced more trauma than most of his modern readers ever will.

I could take a walk with my wife and try to explain the ghosts I can't stop speaking to. Or I could read all those books piling upabout the beginning of the end of understanding...Meanwhile, it's such a beautiful morning,the changing colors, the hypnotic light.I could sit by the window watching the leaves,which seem to know exactly how to fallfrom one moment to the next. Or I could loseeverything and have to begin over again.

I was willing to yield to nostalgia, that melancholy residue of desire.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia.

Advice is a form of Nostalgia

See, that's the problem with putting too much stock in the old days. You remember all the GOOD stuff, but you forget about the time you got spanked by your best friend's mom.

He couldn’t believe that sleep had robbed him of this spectacle night after night. Such are the writer’s privileges, he thought, nostalgic already for the present.

Was it possible to feel nostalgic about something that had never happened to him, possible for nostalgia to be taken in by the body as a free pathogen to infect the consciousness with stray sentiments? Perhaps, in his dreams, he had traveled back in time, or even drifted into another dimension of space-time and inhabited the body, experiences, and nostalgia of another. To even envisage so allowed the trauma of those lost moments, though not his own, to draw from him a certain envy for the entity in whose memories he had basked vicariously. . .Perhaps, nostalgia was a microorganism. . .the bacterium that infected. . . Yes. . .maybe he was sick.

If you want to be with somebody who gets you, you prefer collusion to desire, safety to excitement (sometimes good things to prefer but not always the things most wanted). The wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as adults, to the grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers of the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be, among many other things our most violent form of nostalgia.

Nostalgia dies in the pit of my throat from lack of exercise and I buried the word six feet under the pronunciation of hopeful tomorrows.

Parched by the deprivation of your love for so long made me forget what a cup brimming with love, on my lips, felt like. Everything that now wets it, only wrinkles it with a bland taste.

Super 8 film is the language of silence.

Underwater madness slipping into a haze, drowning and choking in repugnant nostalgic thoughts.

This sweet-bitter scentIs still making me faintEnduring the painThat makes me insane.Trying to smile everydayTo hide the feelings I bearHide in bed and layPraying to ease the fear.The scent of perfumeIs the reason of my consciousnessIt wakens the inner loomAnd brings back the memories.

There were always those passengers who came aboard bearing grudges against the modern age.

At this time in his life Zinkoff sees no difference between the stars in the sky and the stars in his mother's plastic Baggie. He believes that stars fall from the sky sometimes, and that his mother goes around collecting them like acorns. He believes she has to use heavy gloves and dark sunglasses because the fallen stars are so hot and shiny. She puts them in the freezer for forty-five minutes, and when they come out they are flat and silver and sticky on the back and ready for his shirts.

In the Catskills, nostalgia runs backwards. The upwardly mobile Jewish masses of the 1950s and 1960s have been replaced by the Jews of 19th century Poland.

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

In the quagmire of feelings and emotions that engulf us on our drab and monotonous days and starry, resplendent nights, the ones that bring back past memories hold a special place, almost a unique pedestal, in our hearts! The distinct fragrance of nostalgia that serenades us in our minds is incomparable and is akin to a feeling of ecstasy. A feeling that hovers in our minds for a humongous period of time, one that takes us to leviathan heights in the midst of chaos and cacophony. It is as if we found a new elixir that rejuvenates us and makes us spring back into life.

As it is there isn't a single thing isn't an opportunity for some 'alert' person, including practically everybody by the 'greed', that, they are 'alive', therefore. Etc. That, in fact, there are 'conditions'. Gravelly Hill or any sort of situation for improvement, when the Earth was properly regarded as a 'garden tenement messuage orchard and if this is nostalgia let you take a breath of April showers let's us reason how is the dampness in your nasal passage -- but I have had lunch in this 'pasture' (B. Ellery to George Girdler Smith 'gentleman' 1799, for £150)overlooking 'the town' sitting there like the Memphite lord of all Creationwith my back -- with Dogtownover the Crown of gravelly hillIt is not bad to be pissed off

Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar...

From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions - fear, desire, anger - serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost . . . .

People leave traces of themselves where they feel most comfortable, most worthwhile.

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 what would he say? --some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning--indeed they did.

Yeah, you’re right about having entire rooms full of film and photos… in that Sydney Mines house I have a darkroom, I have boxes of film and home movie footage… I have a few projectors, I have piles of Kodachrome slides… I like photographs. The world is always running away from society and the only way to keep the stuff that’s happened in the past is by taking photographs, I can keep memories of things alive with photographs,” Alecto responded. “People say that a time machine can’t be invented, but they’ve already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world’s first time machines… The steel mill, the coal mines, the train tracks, the smog in the sky, I’ve been able to rescue it on super-8 and Kodachrome, and no one can remediate those photographs, I can keep them as long as I want to.

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 almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory

Memories are fragile, you try to grab them and they skitter away in various directions. Trying to gather them together to write them out is difficult, they resist, get clouded and escape as wisps of smoke. Nothing seems as crystal clear as it once was, a milky film of opacity envelopes everything. Odd details stand out in one’s mind, not a continuum. A fragrance, an odour, the smell of toast burning perhaps or whiff of jasmine, a shade of pink, a flower pressed between the pages of a book, brings on a sharp burst of memories that drown you with their immediacy.

Her grandparents’ house was an old crammed up space just like all the others there, but to Sofia it had the luxuries of a palace and the reverence of a church.

And all these things she always counted on to revisit, they made up a map, the map of a true home. It was the only place where she felt she had an identity and a history behind her.

Now, obviously, all old people seem cool whenever we see black-and-white images of their younger selves. It's human nature to inject every old picture with positive abstractions. We can't help ourselves. We all do it. We want those things to be true, because we all hope future generations will have the same thoughts when they come across forgotten photographs of us.

Nostalgia is a lane of calm comfort, charming even a complacent heart!

As he turns around and her eyes meet his, she lets go off the breath that she had been holding back. All the words she had practised to say when the moment arrived, dissolve at the tip of her tongue. All the things she wanted him to know escape her in the thick blanket of nostalgia that wraps itself around her.

I handed the photo back to her. The caretaker gazed at it as if it were a lucky charm, a return ticket to her youth.

As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.

The log on the fire: is it dreaming of the forest?

At his age, it can be overwhelming and painful to harbor a thought accompanied by too much nostalgia. Not that he wanted to. Mabel, in her final years, had stopped listening to music. The songs of her teenage years brought her back to people and feelings of that time - people she could never see again and sensations that were no longer coming. It was too much for her. There are people who can manage such things. There are those of us who can no longer walk, but can close our eyes and remember a summer hike through a field, or the feeling of cool grass beneath our feet, and smile. Who still have the courage to embrace the past, and give it life and a voice in the present. But Mabel was not one of those people. Maybe she lacked that very form of courage. Or maybe her humanity was so complete, so expansive, that she would be crushed by her capacity to imagine the love that was gone.

We talked for four hours. I don't remember most of it, but often a little moment in an unrelated conversation or alone on the street will trigger a memory of it I didn't know I had. So I know it's all there somewhere.

We talked for four hours. I don't remember most of it, but often a little moment in an unrelated conversation or alone on the street will trigger a memory of it that I didn't know I had. So I know it's all there somewhere.

for those memories are nowjust like these little kittensI hold in my handsthose can be kissedand treasuredbut not held too tightly.

O for those days when these tired metaphors were teenagers too, when it was still possible to recite ‘Daffodils’ and feel thrilled as you gazed at the golden laburnum in bloom. Recognising clichés is a sign of aging. Sweet as the past may be, it best remains pressed within the pages of memory, savoured for a moment ortwo on quiet Sunday afternoons.

It is said that when a person is experiencing death, and when shards of life begins to disintegrate from his mortal body, he starts getting a flashback of his entire life right in front of his eyes, like a reverie – a dream, or sometimes even a nightmare. When a person is dying, he can get a brief look of all the significant milestones of his life right in front of his eyes, as if time doesn’t exist and he is still right there, in that moment, where everything is possible; where he can get a piece of forever, while living in that uninvited flashback, and dying in his life, both at the same time.

Upstairs, in the cupboard, he had a box of things he had saved as a boy and a young man. He hadn't looked into it in twenty years or more. Nothing fancy or valuable, but things that had meant something to him at one time. He found it, and found the key, and carried it downstairs without opening it.

We all leave behind bits of loose thread. Old operations, old enemies. They pull at you, like memories of old lovers.

It seems sometimes that we get so caught up in missing the past, or looking forward to the future, that we forget that this, right here and now, was once the days we longed for and will soon be the ones we miss.

Don’t ever feel bad that someone couldn’t give you all of their heart. Be grateful that you can take the least complicated part of their soul with you, wherever you go. This is more than some people will ever have.

Aching familiar in a way that made me wish I was still eight. Eight was before death or divorce or heartbreak. Eight was just eight. Hot dogs and peanut butter, mosquito bites and splinters, bikes and boogie boards. Tangled hair, sunburned shoulders, Judy Blume, in bed by nine thirty.

She didn't want to forget how deeply she had loved him, how important it had been to her; she felt as if to discard the memory would be a betrayal of her younger self.

She ordered a martini and encouraged me to, but said she couldn't drink it with her medication. She just liked seeing it in front of her, like the old days, all set to do its little magic.

I am sick of old ghosts and I just want to feel safe again without the haunts of old vulnerabilities.

How can days and happenings and moments so good become so quickly ugly, and for no reason, for no real reason? Just - change.With nothing causing it.

Nostalgia is the only friend that stays with you forever.

In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

Why don’t we keep track of the happy moments, so that afterward we will believe them? Is he the same man Was he really sincere?

I long for the days when I was One with the one who was the only one I could be One with.

When I was younger, I was told that there is too much inside me. That I have feelings where others have bone. At the age of seven, a doctor tapped inside my head and asked, "Do you choke on memories from time to time? Do you cry for no good reason at all? Do words take a hammer to your head and crack your skull?" Yes, yes, yes, I nodded. "Then you've definitely got them," he said, as he checked off a box on his list. "Too many feelings. What a shame. Try not to keep them inside or you'll drown.

I'm just sorry. Sorry that there won't be any more camping trips for kids or rock bands or even new books to read. No more movies or fresh bags of popcorn. It really sucks when you think about it. Of course, there is the possibility that we might be able to win this war, but not for a very long time. Probably longer than you and I will ever exist in this world.""I try not to think about it.""Sometimes it's all I ever think about.

Not very long ago I was driving with my husband on the back roads of Grey County, which is to the north and east of Huron County. We passed a country store standing empty at a crossroads. It had old-fashioned store windows, with long narrow panes. Out in front there was a stand for gas pumps which weren't there anymore. Close beside it was a mound of sumac trees and strangling vines, into which all kinds of junk had been thrown. The sumacs jogged my memory and I looked back at the store. It seemed to me that I had been here once, and the the scene was connected with some disappointment or dismay. I knew that I had never driven this way before in my adult life and I did not think I could have come here as a child. It was too far from home. Most of our drives out of town where to my grandparents'house in Blyth--they had retired there after they sold the farm. And once a summer we drove to the lake at Goderich. But even as I was saying this to my husband I remembered the disappointment. Ice cream. Then I remembered everything--the trip my father and I had made to Muskoka in 1941, when my mother was already there, selling furs at the Pine Tree Hotel north of Gravehurst.

Cabel felt the familiar nostalgic excitement of the endless possibilities encapsulated in a summers' night at Silver Beach. He smiled at himself as a boy and, more ruefully, at the man who now stood on the worn planks of the boardwalk. This night held no possibilities for him, though it was pleasant to remember a time when it did.

I can hardly keep track of the things I don't know, but every now and then comes an ignorance that makes me nostalgic.

I had a dream about you last night. We were in your old Civic. Nine Inch Nails was turned up on the stereo and I was taking pictures of you behind the wheel with my disposable camera. We went through the drive through at El Pollo Loco, placed an order for a hundred bucks worth of food, and then just drove off at the window. I miss being stupid with you.

I do believe that people can only be in love with one landscape in their lifetime. One can appreciate and enjoy many geographies, but there is only one that one feels in one’s bones.

The child I wasis just one breath away from me.

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.

No nostalgia is felt as keenly as nostalgia for things that never existed.

Belittling nostalgia is a frightened man's parlor trick. Be grateful for any prize. Even a paper fortress, albeit briefly, provides shelter from the rain.

The older they get, the better they get when they were younger

Our misconception in viewing the past lies in assuming that doubt and fear, permit, protests, violence and hate were not equally present.

If we don't remember where we came from, we'll go back there.

The Luddite impulse is strong among Christians, and our first reaction is to rage against the machine.

There is nothing quite like a dose of unvarnished history for inoculating people against the tendency to indict the present for failing to measure up to a sentimental notion of the past.

Because that world's gone. The world where people walked around whistling that music. All the madrigal singers in the world can't make that other one real again. It's like dinosaurs. We can put them back together perfectly, bone for bone, but we don't know what they smelled like, what kind of sounds they made, or how big they really looked standing in the grass under all those fossil fern trees. Even the sunlight must have been different, and the wind. What can bones tell you about a kind of wind that doesn't blow anymore?

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

You can go other places, all right - you can live on the other side of the world, but you can't ever leave home

Looking at the elementary schoolers in their colorful T-shirts from various day camps, Percy felt a twinge of sadness. He should be at Camp Half-Blood right now, settling into his cabin for the summer, teaching sword-fighting lessons in the arena, playing pranks on the other counselors. These kids had no idea just how crazy a summer camp could be.

It's one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed's drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can't go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you--they're not, don't flatter yourself, they couldn't care less--but because once you're in orbit and you return to Reed's drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha's Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.

[T]he very color of the air in the place I was born was different, the smell of the earth was special, redolent with memories of my parents.

She considered what had made Denmark home to her anyway. Was it the sense of familiarity? That wherever she went there were echoes of a hundred memories she could pluck from her thoughts?

Home is where you feel more welcome, more secure, have more rights, where you are loved. This place can be any place even away from what you would normally call home.

Nostalgia is a longing for your home.

From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes 'responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.' It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, 'the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home?

Last night I walked for hours. It was as if I wanted to get lost down some unknown street. To get absolutely and happily lost. But there are moments when we can’t, when we don’t know how to lose our way. Even if we always go in the wrong direction. Even if we lose all our points of reference. Even if it begins to grow late and we feel the weight of morning as we advance. There are times when no matter how we try to find out what we don’t know, we can’t lose our way. And perhaps we long for the time when we could be lost. The time when all the streets were new.

I had this dream about you last night. We were still married. I was giving you a haircut, like I always did, being careful to trim around the scar on the back of your head. I’m sorry I sometimes forgot it and left you with a bald spot. And, I’m sorry we didn’t work out. But you look pretty happy on Instagram.

The rising wave of nostalgia and an increasing interest in heritage sites and historic buildings is perhaps not only a sense of yearning for a lost Singapore, but also the recognition that neither 1959 nor 1965 marked Year One (...) In all the campaigns and features on Singapore's 50th anniversary that I've come across, the Kranji War Memorial was never mentioned. It just doesn't fit the slender narrative. That's such a shame because the cemetery is a fitting, dignified tribute to thousands of Singapore heroes, both local and foreign.

There's just something about the way he sings. It makes me think of when it snows outside, and the fire is warm, and Podo is telling us a story while you're cooking, and there's no place I'd rather be--but for some reason I still feel... homesick.

94 was a good year to be twelve. Star Wars still had two more years as Box Office King, cartoons were still hand-drawn, and the Disney "D" still looked like a backwards "G." Words like "Columbine," "Al Qaeda" and "Y2K" were not synonymous with "terror," and 9-1-1 was an emergency number instead of a date. At twelve years old, summer still mattered. Monarch caterpillars still crawled beneath every milkweed leaf. Dandelions (or "wishes" as Mara called them) were flowers instead of pests. And divorce was still considered a tragedy. Before Mara, carnivals didn't make me sick.

Stoner and Masters smiled at each other, and they spoke no more of the question that evening. But for years afterward, at odd moments, Stoner remembered what Masters had said; and though it brought him no vision of the University to which he had committed himself, it did reveal to him something about his relationship to the two men, and it gave him a glimpse of the corrosive and unspoiled bitterness of youth.

I don't like being with grown-up people. I've known that a long time. I don't like it because I don't know how to get on with them.

And I’ll look back at him because I shan’t be able to help it, remembering about being young, and about being made love to and making love, about pain and dancing and not being afraid of death, about all music I’ve ever loved, and every time I’ve been happy.

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 had all their hopes intact. The world is bound to look a darker place as you slide into the grave.

As we grow older we are apt to forget that the despair of the young is even more gigantic and immediately overwhelming than their hopefulness: we never again face such towering blank walls of misery.

We cling to the most painful reminders of our youth, our memories or our injuries, perhaps so we can look back to our former selves, console them, and say: Keep going. I know how the story ends.

Once upon a time we all walked on the golden road. It was a fair highway, through the Land of Lost Delight; shadow and sunshine were blessedly mingled, and every turn and dip revealed a fresh charm and a new loveliness to eager hearts and unspoiled eyes.On that road we heard the song of morning stars; we drank in fragrances aerial and sweet as a May mist; we were rich in gossamer fancies and iris hopes; our hearts sought and found the boon of dreams; the years waited beyond and they were very fair; life was a rose-lipped comrade with purple flowers dripping from her fingers.We may long have left the golden road behind, but its memories are the dearest of our eternal possessions; and those who cherish them as such may haply find a pleasure in the pages of this book, whose people are pilgrims on the golden road of youth.

I want to be six years old again - just for a day.It's not that things were so much better back then. They sucked.But I was the kind of kid who knew how to laugh about it all.That's what I want. I want to laugh.

Now that lilacs are in bloomShe has a bowl of lilacs in her roomAnd twists one in her fingers while she talks."Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not knowWhat life is, you who hold it in your hands"; (slowly twisting the lilac stalks)"You let it flow from you, you let it flow,And youth is cruel, and has no remorseAnd smiles at situations which it cannot see."I smile, of course,And go on drinking tea.

This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.

I wish I had heard him more clearly: an oblique confession is always a plea.

When he smiles like that, there's a single dimple. It was the thing that got me the very first time I saw him.

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.

I hated Sundays as a kid. From the moment I woke up, I could feel Monday looming, could feel another school week all piled up and ready to smother me. How was I supposed to enjoy a day of freedom while drowning in dread like that? It was impossible. A pit would form in my chest and gut—this indescribable emptiness that I knew should be filled with fun, but instead left me casting about for something to do. Knowing I should be having fun was a huge part of the problem. Knowing that this was a rare day off, a welcome reprieve, and here I was miserable and fighting against it. Maybe this was why Fridays at school were better than Sundays not in school. I was happier doing what I hated, knowing a Saturday was coming, than I was on a perfectly free Sunday with a Monday right around the corner.

Whenever they were together they couldn't let sixty of their minutes pass without asking each other what time it was; as if time was a volatile currency that they either possessed or did not possess, when in fact time was more of a fog that rose inexorably over all their words and deeds so that their were either forgotten or misremembered.

The earlier years - the ones I've just been telling you about - they tend to blur into each other as a kind of golden time, and when I think about them at all, even the not-so-great things, I can't help feeling a sort of glow.

Will the time ever come when I am not so completely dependent on thoughts I first had in childhood to furnish the feedstock for my comparisons and analogies and sense of the parallel rhythms of microhistory? Will I reach a point where there will be a good chance, I mean a more than fifty-fifty chance, that any random idea popping back into the foreground of my consciousness will be an idea that first came to me when I was an adult, rather than one I had repeatedly as a child?

It's like I'm dreaming of the imaginary friend Katie and I had when we were little. She'd been so real to us as kids. We each remembered Anna, that's what we'd called her, just like we remembered bits of our parents. But now, in this dreamscape of Paradise Lost, our imaginary third twin has all grown up.

We take it for granted that life moves forward. You build memories; you build momentum.You move as a rower moves: facing backwards. You can see where you've been, but not where you’re going. And your boat is steered by a younger version of you. It's hard not to wonder what life would be like facing the other way. Avenoir.You'd see your memories approaching for years, and watch as they slowly become real.You’d know which friendships will last, which days are important, and prepare for upcoming mistakes. You'd go to school, and learn to forget.One by one you'd patch things up with old friends, enjoying one last conversation before youmeet and go your separate ways. And then your life would expand into epic drama. The colors would get sharper, the world would feel bigger.You'd become nothing other than yourself, reveling in your own weirdness.You'd fall out of old habits until you could picture yourself becoming almost anything. Your family would drift slowly together, finding each other again. You wouldn't have to wonder how much time you had left with people, or how their lives would turn out.You'd know from the start which week was the happiest you’ll ever be, so you could relive it again and again.You'd remember what home feels like,and decide to move there for good. You'd grow smaller as the years pass, as if trying to give away everything you had before leaving.You'd try everything one last time, until it all felt new again. And then the world would finally earn your trust, until you’d think nothing of jumping freely into things, into the arms of other people.You'd start to notice that each summer feels longer than the last.Until you reach the long coasting retirement of childhood.You'd become generous, and give everything back.Pretty soon you’d run out of things to give, things to say, things to see.By then you'll have found someone perfect; and she'll become your world.And you will have left this world just as you found it. Nothing left to remember, nothing left to regret, with your whole life laid out in front of you, and your whole life left behind.

I have such a hopeless dream of walking or being there at night, nothing happens, I just pass, everything is unbearably over with.

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 in the hay...All those summer days-scouring the banks of the Avon for smooth, round stones-scaring up ducks and foxes-kingfishers-swallows...somebody's dog...Oh, God-I want it back. Throwing stones that never reached the other shore. And the games-the games-the games, and all my friends...

I would often sit in the corner of the room wearing Dad's massive headphones, carefully replaying the records time after time. It was something I did frequently throughout my childhood with music, comedy and film, inspiring my own creative imagination, the headphones rendering the experience intensely personal, as though it were all happening inside my own head.

You see, when you're young and foolish it doesn't matter where you may be, you always think that you'll be happier somewhere else.

Why is it that places thousands of miles from my childhood village home send me back, opening the sluice-gates of the past? Well, we are all emigrants from the homeland of our childhoods. It may be, then, that the natural place to meet ourselves as children is 'abroad', and that includes the foreign country of our growing up and aging. So it is that the personal, physical feeling of departure from the time of childhood may merge in a special symbiosis with geographical departure, biography and geography resonating now on a single wavelength.

Sometimes It's awesome to be childish with your friend or partner.

Hannah ran past, beaming. I remember that feeling--when you're a kid and it's your birthday and for one day everyone makes you feel like the most special person in the world.

...because you are not trying simply to complete a set of books or toys or Weetabix cards, you are trying to complete yourself, to get back to the whole person you were before, as a child, before the obstructions and compromises of adulthood got in the way. And yet, all you are really doing is accumulating a pile of crap, souvenirs of the futility of the quest.

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

The prints shop manager, a balding man of about thirty years old, dressed in a plaid work shirt and faded jeans, looked very shocked when he saw the headline text. “Sydney Tar Ponds, Is It As Dangerous As People Say? Well,” he exclaimed, glancing at the front photo, which featured the Sydney Steel Corporation, along with its plumes of orange smog. “You know, most people your age are really against that mill, as if it’s a disease. We have university students protesting every few weeks or so… strangely enough, the ones who have parents who rely on that steel mill to pay the bills.”“What about the pollution?” Wendy questioned, almost accusingly, as if it was his fault. “What if dangerous chemicals are in the environment?”“Hey kid, I don’t even work at the mill, never have, but my father, my uncle, their father, cousins, all worked there,” the prints shop man argued, placing the newspapers in a cardboard box and taping it shut. “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 newspapers might have a point.

This is because the nature of this place is a strong emotion - "nostalgia" is their word for it - which means a longing for what has never been, or at least not in the form and shape imagined.

It was a cultural revolution, and was not directed at instituting economic changes. He could thus appeal to old prejudices without threatening the existing economic system. This appealed, above all, to white-collar workers and the small entrepreneurs, as some of the statistics presented in this book will demonstrate. It was their kind of revolution: the ideology would give them a new status, free them from isolation in the industrial society, and give them a purpose in life. But it would not threaten any of their vested interests; indeed it would reinforce their bourgeois predilections toward family...and restore the 'good old values' which had been so sadly dismantled by modernity.

Schoolboy days are no happier than the days of afterlife, but we look back upon them regretfully because we have forgotten our punishments at school and how we grieved when our marbles were lost and our kites destroyed – because we have forgotten all the sorrows and privations of the canonized ethic and remember only its orchard robberies, its wooden-sword pageants, and its fishing holidays.

That gap between half sleep and half awakening has always been occupied by nostalgia.

Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the truth, maybe I didn't want things to turn abstract, but I felt I should say it, because this was the moment to say it, because it suddenly dawned on me that this was why I had come, to tell him "You are the only person I'd like to say goodbye to when I die, because only then will this thing I call my life make any sense. And if I should hear that you died, my life as I know it, the me who is speaking with you now, will cease to exist.

Over the years I'd lodged him in the permanent past, my pluperfect lover, put him on ice, stuffed him with memories and mothballs like a hunted ornament confabulating with the ghost of all my evenings. I'd dust him off from time to time and then put him back on the mantelpiece. He no longer belonged to earth or to life. All I was likely to discover at this point wasn't just how distant were the paths we'd taken, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me--a loss I didn't mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we've stopped thinking of things we lost and may never have cared for.

There's always one sure way of finding out that you're a misfit. When you're eleven years old, and your friends are telling you that they just sneaked into the theater to watch 'Twilight' and that it was "sooooo emotional and sooooo terrifying and soooooo romantic!" - but you've been spending the summer watching 'Rosemary's Baby' and 'Don't Look Now' and knowing the lines to all the Alfred Hitchcock films by heart - that's the moment you realize that you're a misfit.

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

When you have no future, you live in the past.

Elizabeth ran her finger along the windowsill, gathering dust. The view was almost exactly the same as from her own bedroom, only a few degrees shifted. She could still see the Rosens' place, with its red door and folding shutters, and the Martinez house, with its porch swing and the dog bowl. She'd heard once that what made you a real New Yorker was when you could remember back three laters -- the place on the corner that had been a bakery and then a barbershop before it was a cell-phone store, or the restaurant that had been Italian, then Mexican, then Cuban. The city was a palimpsest, a Mod Podged pileup or old signage and other people's failures. Newcomers saw only what was in front of them, but people who had been there long enough were always looking at two or three other places simultaneously. The IRT, Canal Jeans, the Limelight. So much of the city she'd fallen in love with was gone, but then again, that's how it worked. It was your job to remember. At least the bridges were still there. Some things were too heavy to take down.

Have you ever noticed how as an adult, all the bright colors go out of your life? Now that I’m not a kid anymore, things always look gray, like a clothesline draped with laundry that’s been washed too many times and left to stand in the wind. I guess that’s what growing up is… it’s a fading photograph.

Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day - very much such a sweetness as this - I struck my first whale - a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty - forty - forty years ago! - ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without - oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command! - when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before - and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare - fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul - when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts - away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow - wife? wife? - rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey - more a demon than a man! - aye, aye! what a forty years' fool - fool - old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God! - crack my heart! - stave my brain! - mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board! - lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!

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 know. I'm aware, in an intellectual way. That I felt all those things about him, but this emotions are far away now.What's so strange to me is that I can't even force my heart back to that place where I felt that all consuming passion. That makes me feel distant from myself. Who WAS I then? Will I ever be able to get back to that place? Reading the letters again made me wonder: Which is the real me? The one who saw the world in that emotionally saturated way, or the me who sees it the way I do now?

...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 the trash, clean your room, pick up that mess, fold those towels, mow the lawn... the list was endless. We all became adept at chore-avoidance. Staying out of sight was a reliable strategy. Drawing or painting was another: to my mother, making art trumped making beds. A third choir-avoidance technique was to read. A kid with his or her nose in a book is a kid who is not fighting, yelling, throwing, breaking things, bleeding, whining, or otherwise creating a Mom-size headache. Reading a book was almost like being invisible - a good thing for all concerned.

Old houses were scaffolding once and workmen whistling.

We drove down Corydon avenue towards my mother's apartment. How are you doing, she asked me? Fine, fine, I said. I wanted to tell her that I felt I was dying from rage and that I felt guilty about everything and that when I was a kid I woke up every morning singing, that I couldn't wait to leap out of bed and rush out of the house into the magical kingdom that was my world, that dust made visible in sunbeams gave me real authentic joy, that my sparkly golden banana-seated bike with the very high sissy bar took my breath away, the majesty of it, that it was mine, that there was no freer soul in the world than me at age nine, and that now I wake up every morning reminding myself that control is an illusion, taking deep breaths and counting to ten trying to ward off panic attacks and hoping that my own hands hadn't managed to strangle me while I slept.

I couldn’t help but think about school and everything else ending. I liked standing just outside the couches and watching them—it was a kind of sad I didn’t mind, and so I just listened, letting all the happiness and the sadness of this ending swirl around in me, each sharpening the other. For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way.

When people talk about the good old days, I say to people, 'It's not the days that are old, it's you that's old.' I hate the good old days. What is important is that today is good.

...but now the love of Charles for Emma seemed to her a desertion from her tenderness, an encroachment upon what was hers, and she watched her son's happiness in sad silence, as a ruined man looks through the windows at people dining in his old house.

And what if the other kids laugh at me?” Kerry complained to her parents as she nibbled on a piece of toast that morning. “I have a Cape Breton accent! They’ll know I’m from Canada and they’ll start asking me if I lived in an igloo or ate maple syrup, bacon and seal meat every day!”“You’re really overreacting,” Susan chuckled, sipping on a glass of orange juice. “Canada is a lot like the States and the only thing separating both countries is an imaginary boarder! If anyone laughs at you, tell them it doesn’t snow year-round, you got free health care while you were there and that you never rode a polar bear to school. Besides, do you know how many popular movies and TV shows from the States were filmed in Canada?”“It’s not just the Canada stuff mom,” Kerry sighed worriedly. “I’m from Dym, it’s an industrial dump!”“Yeah, and have you looked at Pittsburgh lately?” Susan asked. “Full of coal mines and steel mills, just like Sydney was when we lived there! I actually rather came to like the pollution, I don’t think I’d ever want to leave it.

NW" is full of split selves, people alienated from the very things they thought defined them. Their nostalgia -- for old movies, old songs, buses they don't ride anymore -- is less a salve than a form of pain.

I think we ought to find something else to do,” said Mandy. “But Alecto my love, you’re the first person to notice my retro diner kitchen. When my parents saw it, they thought I was creating a weird art project.”“I like it. It's got that let’s-drown-ourselves-in-better-days type ambiance,” Alecto declared, his gray eyes narrowed.

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 any nasty letters and I won't get any nasty phone calls and I won't get any nasty visitors. It's like a sanctuary. I feel as if I'm fifteen again, with nothing to worry about but my Homework. (And I haven't even got any of that.)

If nostalgia holds you hostage,the ransom is the present.

The belonging you seek is not behind you. It is ahead.

Once upon a time the future was supposed to be brighter, shinier and more fun. When did that vision pass? When did the word 'new' lose it's luster? Now the past is supposed to hold the hopes we once confided to the future. We're directing attachments that used to go forward backward.

Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.

I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge.

Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry, aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert.

We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live.

Some stories, some visions, demand celluloid film and what it can deliver.

The past is a candle at great distance: too close to let you quit, too far to comfort you.

We are homesick most for the places we have never known.

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.

How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more

It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back.

One is always at home in one's past...

For an instant I think I saw. I saw the loneliness of man as a gigantic wave which had been frozen in front of me, held back by the invisible wall of a metaphor.

Each night I lie down in a graveyard of memories.

I'm your phantom dance partner. I'm your shadow. I'm not anything more.

We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today. I don't think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great. If you're hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time.

...And nostalgia is a cancer. Nostalgia will fill your heart up with tumors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what you are. You're just an old fart dying of terminal nostalgia.

We were nostalgic for a time that wasn't yet over.

Moments never stay, whether or not you ask them, they do not care, no moment cares, and the ones you wish could stretch out like a hammock for you to lie in, well, those moments leave the quickest and take everything good with them, little burglars, those moments, those hours, those days you loved the most.

Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.

Have you ever wondered how nostalgia isn"t what it used to be?

There are no days more full than those we go back to.

I love how summer just wraps it’s arms around you like a warm blanket.

Life used to move much more quickly when I was a girl. We needed to abbreviate just to keep up.

The best times we’ve had on earth are usually with those we love.

The abbreviated exam week meant that Wednesday was the last day of school for us. And all day long, it was hard not to walk around, thinking about the lastness of it all.

I felt a pang -- a strange and inexplicable pang that I had never felt before. It was homesickness. Now, even more than I had earlier when I'd first glimpsed it, I longed to be transported into that quiet little landscape, to walk up the path, to take a key from my pocket and open the cottage door, to sit down by the fireplace, to wrap my arms around myself, and to stay there forever and ever.

Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.

You can't return to a place that no longer exists, luv.

In every age "the good old days" were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

It's not like I'm all into nostalgia and history, it's just that I can't stand the way things are now

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 to that land, or do you, somewhere in your heart, want to return to your homeland.

Journey to the end of day, Come the fire-fly, Come the moon; Say a prayer for God's good grace And sleep with lore upon your face.

When I was a kid, they had a saying, 'to err is human but to really fuck it up takes a computer.’

…nostalgia is, by definition, the least authentic of all feelings.

We long to have again the vanished past, in spite of all its pain.

Dark came early and stayed full of lights and the shouts of children.

He decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.

No matter how fierce was the passion that gripped him, the fact is he was paralyzed, transfixed by the contemplation of his own past. Only something so momentous as to drive from his consciousness all thoughts of before and after could have propelled him forward. And with his eyes fixed on the past, he had no choice but to continue along its trajectory.

Anyway, those things would not have lasted long.The experience of the years shows it to me.But Destiny arrived in some haste and stopped them.The beautiful life was brief.But how potent were the perfumes,On how splendid a bed we lay,To what sensual delight we gave our bodies.An echo of the days of pleasure,An echo of the days drew near me,A little of the fire of the youth of both of us,Again I took in my hands a letter,And I read and reread till the light was gone.And melancholy, I came out on the balconyCame out to change my thoughts at least by looking atA little of the city that I loved,A little movement on the street and in the

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

And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that—except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it.

You may say, But wasn't this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.

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, but to ourselves, a very short time hence.

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 wandering on a foreign strand? If such there breathe, go, mark him well; For him no Minstrel raptures swell; High though his titles, proud his name, Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;Despite those titles, power, and pelf, The wretch, concentred all in self, Living, shall forfeit fair renown, And, doubly dying, shall go down To the vile dust from whence he sprung,Unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung.

The sixties are like a theme park to them. They wear the costume, buy their tickets, and they have the experience.

...underneath that I'd said something else: we were both a couple of asswipes, and now only I'm an asswipe; why? And underneath that, something else: once an asswipe, always an asswipe.

Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance.

Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world.

The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.

Nostalgic memory is a sudden encounter with the thingness of the thing that has been forgotten, not the continuous desire for possessions, whether past, present, or future.

Now and then I see a balloon caught in the power lines, holding on, waving, flapping softly in the evening air, and I wonder if somebody in some faraway city tried to send it to heaven the way my mother and I used to do.

The idea that she would leave all of this - the rooms of the house once more familiar and warm and comforting - and go back to Brooklyn and not return for a long time again frightened her now. She knew as she sat on the edge of the bed and took her shoes off and then lay back with her arms behind her head that she had spent every day putting off all thought of her departure and what she would meet on her arrival.

It's a peculiar kind of dissatisfaction, a bittersweet nostalgia for a moment not yet past.

People I had never seen before flocked in, their faces showing a longing you never saw for cake. People's eyes lit up for a cupcake, cake seemed to signal celebration. But their eyes got filmy, watery, misty when we handed them a slice of pie. Pie was memory. Nostalgia. Pie made people recall simpler, maybe happier times.

If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: "The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency.

I think it's my memory of this period that makes me fantasise about living in the country. In reality I know there would be no shops and I would kill myself.

Nostalgia is missing what might come back.

Nostalgia. It haunts us, it destroys us, and sometimes, its sentimentality consumes us piece by piece so that we may realize our once-familiar circumstance may never again return. It is a state of mind best indulged infrequently.

However, I suppose VH1 *is* selling me something; they're selling nostalgia, which means they're selling my own memories back to me, which means they're selling me to me.

I missed you more now than I had when I lost you. I was forgetting the bad things faster than I forgot the good, and the changing ratio felt a little bit like falling in love even though I was actually speaking to you less and less.

The hours were long, but the days were short, and as much as I willed it to never come, the end of summer arrived anyway.

I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It's full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being 'objective.' Nostalgia for what? I don't know. Because I'd rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the 'Anna' of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

Allie sighed. It was an old yellow sound, like turning pages.

...I have to admit that I've ... always felt burdened by nostalgia, by a desire to stop time, to recapture things that have been lost. A sense that everything, absolutely everything, is on a journey from which there's no return.

I want each day to last forever . . . It's a peculiar kind of dissatisfaction, a bittersweet nostalgia for a moment not yet past. Even in the midst of a pleasurable outing I'm aware of how ephemeral it is.

Do you know why they call me the Count? Because I love to count! Ah-ha

Maybe that's just what nostalgia is: a willingness to embrace the pain of the past.

There was an irony and a paradox here: Franco thought of Pontito constantly, saw it in fantasy, depicted it, as infinitely desirable – and yet he had a profound reluctance to return. But it is precisely such a paradox that lies at the heart of nostalgia – for nostalgia is about a fantasy that never takes place, one that maintains itself by not being fulfilled. And yet such fantasies are not just idle daydreams or fancies; they press toward some fulfillment, but an indirect one - the fulfillment of art. These, at least, are the terms that D. Geahchan, the French psychoanalyst, has used. With reference in particular to the greatest of nostalgies, Proust, the psychoanalyst David Werman speaks of an 'aesthetic crystallization of nostalgia' - nostalgia raised to the level of art and myth.

Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare ourselves and our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed.

I have a habit of being an archaeologist of my own past, a sentimental collector of personal artefacts which may at first glance appear random, but each of which holds a unique significance. As the years pass me by, I find that the number of objects within my possession begins to accumulate. A torn map. A sealed letter. A boat full of paper animals. Each item encapsulates within itself a story, akin to an outward manifestation of my inner journey.

I miss the thrill of your self-destructive heart that melts in the sun like chocolate, bittersweet and incandescent.

I miss it like an ex-con misses the other inmates.

If there ever were one moment where everything worked for us, where we lived in harmony and at ease with our natures, then we would still be there. There is no garden to return to, no idyllic perfect childhood, no enwombed state. The Garden of Eden was boring, childhood is a nightmare we should all be grateful to be done with, and your mother smoked while she was pregnant and poisoned you in the womb with artificial sugar substitutes. The best thing any of us can do is just to keep fucking up in a forward motion, and see what comes out of it.

Saudade.A nostalgic longing to be near again to something or someone that is distant, or that has been loved and then lost; "the love that remains".

I love the way he smelled whenever his head dipped close to hear what I was saying—like the sun striking th cheek of a tomato, or soap drying in the hood of a car. I loved the way his hand felt on my spine. I loved.

My dear, you never will understand time, will you? You're always trying to be the things you were, instead of the person you are tonight. Why do you save those ticket stubs and theater programs? They'll only hurt you later. Throw them away, my dear.

What I want, more than anything, is to turn back time a little. To become the kid I used to be, who believed whatever my mother said was one hundred percent true and right without looking hard enough to see the hairline cracks.

I'm nostalgic for a better tomorrow.

... nostalgia was once thought to be a mental illness or a physical affliction; for me, it was both.

He tilted the box toward a chipped Pottery Barn blue bowl, and the little blue clumps, like cerulean rat turds, tumbled out, hitting the porcelain with a surprisingly metallic thud. It sounded like pennies dumped into an aluminum trash can.

I am old enough to enjoy a bit of nostalgia, but wise enough to know that there haven't been any "good ol' days" since Eden (the garden, not the prime minister).

So are we going to eat some Boo Berry or what?" John said, leaping out of his seat and toward the refrigerator.

Graceful. Lean. Coordinated as she whirls, though how she knows what dancing is, [her grandfather] could never guess.The song plays on. He lets it go too long. The antenna is still up, probably dimly visible against the sky, the whole attic might as well shine like a beacon. But in the candlelight, in the sweet rush of a concerto, Marie-Laure bites her lower lip, and her face gives off a secondary glow, reminding him of the marshes beyond the town walls, in those winter dusks when the sun has set but isn't fully swallowed, and big patches of red pools of light burn - places he used to go with his brother, in what seems like lifetimes ago.

He pressed the herb to his nose. Thyme. He loved the name and he loved the smell. He looked out the window at the illusion of deep woods. His face too was out there, hung on a tree and returning his gaze. He drew close to the glass to lose the mirror effect. Outside, the forest panted its beefy halitus; the soil held the breaths of gloom in its dampness. Fifteen thousand years ago a glacier had sliced through this park he was living in, bringing with it the nutrients from all its travels. Fifteen thousand years ago human beings were the fable that frightened the dark woods.

When shall I cease to regret you! – When learn to feel a home elsewhere! – Oh! Happy house, could you know what I suffer in now viewing you from this spot, from whence perhaps I may view you no more! – And you, ye well-known trees! – but you will continue the same. – No leaf will decay because we are removed, nor any branch become motionless although we can observe you no longer! – No; you will continue the same; unconscious of the pleasure or the regret you occasion, and insensible of any change in those who walk under your shade! – But who will remain to enjoy you?

All you will have is the present. Waste no energy crying over yesterday or dreaming of tomorrow. Nostalgia is fatiguing and destructive, it is the vice of the expatriate. You must put down roots as if they were forever, you must have a sense of permanence.

These rotary dials were like meditation, they forced you to slow down and concentrate. If you polled the next number too soon, you had to start over from the top.

an old villa surrounded by a garden looked to them like the image of a comforting home, the dream of an idyll long past.

I roam the streets, silent and still,I look for You, in each and everything.I have come a long way from myself,so away,so long, that I,myself have become a memory.And so i seek Your gaze, to See myself,But what am i ? without Your touch ?How distant You are, yet How close Iam,this place holds a fortune, for my lost self.

Until then her view of time was the present moving forward and devouring the future; she either feared its swiftness (when she was awaiting something difficult) or rebelled at its slowness (when she was awaiting something fine). Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past. She sees a young man disconnecting himself from her life and going away, forevermore out of her reach. 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.

It was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France.

Most of the days, I am gripped by these visions,Memories! that haunt my present,What is it, That Separates me from You ?What is it, That can bring me close ?All through the night, i seek such things,All through the night, i lose Myself .

I understand, Bill. Because I tell myself a lot of stories to help me sleep at night. Stories about how Babe was my dearest friend, and I never betrayed her. Stories about how you and I had a great love, not just an occasional roll in the hay whenever she was out of town. Stories about how wonderful life was back then, when none of us told each other the truth, but so what? It was all so beautiful, wasn’t it? It was all so lovely and gracious. Not like it is now.

And so it is inevitable that the day has come when we write about privacy with such nostalgia, analysing it as we would some unearthed fossil of a creature our human eyes had never fallen on.

His persistent nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldn't stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in florescents, were gone. Everyone had been so much more entertaining then. What had happened?

Nostalgia-- that's the basic sickness, and I never heard of a doctor who can cure it.

I began a lifelong affair with nostalgia, with only the vaguest notions of what I was nostalgic for.

The Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, the walls surrounding a medieval castle: obsolete walls evoke nostalgia. Make your walls obsolete.

Puberty flicked a switch inside of them and dreams were replaced by hormones and college prep courses and varsity sports while I continued to look for faeries in the woods behind my house.

It was a place where, if troubles did not vanish, they were made bearable.

Everyone likes to reminisce, but not one wants to listen, and everyone feels annoyed when someone else tells a story.

Speed is simply the rite that initiates us intoemptiness: a nostalgic desire for forms to revert to immobility, concealed beneath the very intensification of their mobility. Akin to the nostalgia for living forms that haunts geometry.

We’d all agreed that we’d outgrown jumping rope, but Shady had given me such a nice gift of a skipping rope, and when there’s nothing better to do, I guess you go back to what once felt good.

Mixed with the love we hold for our native country is the fact that it is the place where we were raised, and, should anything have gone a little wrong in this process, we will be reminded of this fault, by the scene of the crime, until the day we die.

The old London was fading from her memory. She no longer expected to see the shops that had been bombed when she passed familiar streets. In many places the sites were being redeveloped. That’s what seemed real now – the new buildings and the flats above them. As she hit her stride, Mirabelle smiled. It felt good to be in the big city again and on her way.

Isn't there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves?

I had intended to visit the haunting ground of my school days. Subconsciously I wanted to be in a place where anxiety, responsibility and financial burden had yet to surface.

I would even argue that, for many displaced people, nostalgia is also blended with fear - the fear of uncertainty and of facing the challenges posed by the larger world and the fear of the absence of the clarity and confidence provided by the past. In essence, nostalgia is associated mostly with the experience of a particular type of migrants, namely, exiles.

For youth, the moon is a promise of all those tremendous things which await it, for older people a memento that the promise was never kept, a reminder of all that broke and went to pieces...And what is moonshine? Secondhand sunshine. Diluted, counterfeit.

Divided - No tides of time or distance will wash away your step. It does not fleet as they do, those gladiators and their mighty spears or the beasts that howl into the dark for release. Our story carves deeper, pitilessly, infinitely. A wound that bleeds the ink that stained your palm and the tears of an impossible tomorrow.

The head which does not turn backwards towards horizons that have vanished contains neither thought nor love.

I didn't really want to come back here and again have to feel like my lungs were drowning in this perverse nostalgia.

For a long moment we didn't move. We just stared at each other. So much time had passed since our eyes last met. So much had changed. I turned away and pressed my head to the cold window pane. I traced my initials onto the misted glass and, as they began to fade, He reached out his fingers and retraced my signature. I watched it fade once more and felt his moist fingers brush against my lips. He let them linger there a moment, then replaced them with his own lips. Then I woke up.