859 Quotes About Nostalgia

The fear that all these magical impressions (now clear in my mind) will instantly begin to fade, torments me.

Not all of us have that luxury, of a past. My history doesn't offer me much in that respect.

Evangelicals have squandered their cultural capital because they have tried to reclaim a standing in American culture that they never had. The American Founding was a mix of fragmented religious (and not-so-religious) voices.

I never miss the country not even once. I hate nostalgia. Nostalgia is not memory and my memory is too damn good for it.

By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what it is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss.

Memory is a queer creature, an eccentric curator.

[I]t 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.

...reminiscence is less an endowment than a disease...

And yet . . .looking here at this bottle which by its number signalized the day when Colonel Freeleigh had stumbled and fallen six feet into the earth, Douglas could not find so much as a gram of dark sediment, not a speck of the great flouring buffalo dust, not a flake of sulphur from the guns at Shiloh . . .