#nostalgia

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. ↗

— Mark Twain

#education #maturity #nostalgia #education

That night I looked up at those same stars, but I didn't want any of those things. I didn't want Egypt, or France, or far-flung destinations. I just wanted to go back to my life from my childhood, just to visit it, and touch it, and to convince myself that yes, it had been real. ↗

— Jenny Lawson

#nostalgia #life

Now that lilacs are in bloom She has a bowl of lilacs in her room And twists one in her fingers while she talks. "Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know What 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 remorse And smiles at situations which it cannot see." I smile, of course, And go on drinking tea. ↗

— T.S. Eliot

#nostalgia #remorse #tea #youth #life

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. ↗

— Susan Lendroth

#memory #nostalgia #past #remembering #souvenir

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. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#middle-age #nostalgia #parents #age

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. ↗

— Mike Norton

#illusion #love #nostalgia #sadness #the-past

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

— Stefan Grabiński

#passing-time #men

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. ↗

— Giorgio Bassani

#nostalgia #dreams

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

— William Faulkner

#nostalgia #strange

There is no greater sorrow Than to recall a happy time When miserable. ↗

— Dante Alighieri

#italian-medieval-poetry #nostalgia #À-la-recherche-du-temps-perdu #sorrow