Quotes about nostalgia

A collection of quotes on the topic of nostalgia, use, feeling, time.

Best quotes about nostalgia

“Nostalgia: How long's that been around?”

Bill Bailey (1965) English comedian, musician, actor, TV and radio presenter and author

Is It Bill Bailey? (TV, 1998)

“Sex is nostalgia for sex.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

Quote from: http://nymag.com/arts/art/features/47184/index3.html undated quotes

“In our brave new world, blushing is a form of nostalgia.”

John Leonard (1939–2008) American critic, writer, and commentator

"On Being Embarrassed" (p. 139)
Private Lives in the Imperial City (1979)

“Nostalgia is a fruit with the pain of distance in its pit.”

Giannina Braschi (1953) Puerto Rican writer

Assault on Time, 1981.

“Spare me the nostalgia.”

Jack Finney book From Time to Time

Source: From Time to Time (1995), Chapter 4 (p. 58)
Context: I hate that word. You know who uses it mostly? Time patriots. Same people who live in the best country in the world. Must be the best because that’s where they live. And they live in the best of times; has to be best because it’s their lifetime. You even suggest there just might have been better times than here and now, and it’s ‘nostalgia, nostalgia.’ Don’t even know what the word means. Means overly sentimental, for crysakes.

Quotes about nostalgia

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world's existence. All these half-tones of the soul's consciousness create a raw landscape within us, a sun eternally setting on what we are.”

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher

Os sentimentos que mais doem, as emoções que mais pungem, são os que são absurdos – a ânsia de coisas impossíveis, precisamente porque são impossíveis, a saudade do que nunca houve, o desejo do que poderia ter sido, a mágoa de não ser outro, a insatisfação da existência do mundo. Todos estes meios tons da consciencia da alma criam em nós uma paisagem dolorida, um eterno sol-pôr do que somos.
The Book of Disquietude, trans. Richard Zenith, text 196

World, Feeling, Soul, Sun

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

Vladimir Nabokov book Mary

Source: Mary

Spring, Strong

“The voice so filled with nostalgia that you could almost see the memories floating through the blue smoke, memories not only of music and joy and youth, but perhaps, of dreams. They listened to the music, each hearing it in his own way, feeling relaxed and a part of the music, a part of each other, and almost a part of the world.”

Hubert Selby Jr. Requiem for a Dream

Source: Requiem for a Dream

Youth, World, Dreams, Music

“No loss is felt more keenly than the loss of what might have been. No nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed.”

Rabih Alameddine book An Unnecessary Woman

Source: An Unnecessary Woman

Loss, Hurt

“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 (1951) American author

Source: The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

Life

“There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born

Birth, Time

“If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.”

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) Italian film director, poet, writer and intellectual

Interview in Film Culture, no. 42 (1966), p. 101 https://books.google.it/books?hl=it&id=Jq2RAAAAIAAJ&dq=%22If+you+know%22.

“Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

The Book of Delusions (1936)

“It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice — there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

Source: The Real Frank Zappa Book (1989), p. 203.

World, Imagination

“Once a thing's been done it's been done, so while this nostalgia — I mean for the '60s and '70s, you know, looking backwards for inspiration, copying the past — how's that rock 'n' roll? Do something of your own. Start something new, you know? Live your lives now. Know what I mean?”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

BBC interview, used in a Citroën ad, as quoted in "John Lennon Appearance In Car Ad Stirs Controversy" by Monica Herrera in Billboard (4 March 2010) http://www.billboard.com/column-viralvideos/john-lennon-appearance-in-car-ad-stirs-controversy-1004072693.story#/column-viralvideos/john-lennon-appearance-in-car-ad-stirs-controversy-1004072693.story. Though there has been no official dispute that he made this statement, a YouTube video has claimed that the audio used in the advertisement is not original http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipyUk5-wlFg. Disputed

Past

“He remembered the dissolute adventures in which his senses, his nervous system and his mind had indulged; he saw himself corroded by irony and intellect, laid waste and paralyzed by insight, almost exhausted by the fevers and chills of creation, helplessly and contritely tossed to and fro between gross extremes, between saintly austerity and lust — oversophisticated and impoverished, worn out by cold, rare artificial ecstasies, lost, ravaged, racked and sick — and he sobbed with remorse and nostalgia.”

Thomas Mann book Tonio Kröger

Source: Tonio Kröger (1903), Ch. 8, as translated by David Luke

Sense

“Gide says the hell of this life is that between a hundred paths we have to choose only one, and live wih nostalgia for the other ninety nine. p51”

Fernando Sabino (1923–2004) Brazilian writer

Life, Hell

“Those who wanted to sleep, not from fatigue but because of the nostalgia of dreams…”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

Dreams, Sleep

“For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“His crush went from exciting to depressing, as if he'd gone from the first blush of infatuation to the terminal nostalgia of a former lover without even the temporary relief of an actual relationship in between.”

Lev Grossman The Magicians

Source: The Magicians

Lovers

“The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Source: Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Life, Dreams, Hope, Soul

“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….”

David Nicholls book Us

Source: Us

Fear, Anger

“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight, p. 4

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

Jasper Fforde book First Among Sequels

Source: First Among Sequels

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Memory

“Nostalgia is masochism and masochism is something masochists love to share.”

Andrei Codrescu (1946) American writer

Source: New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City

Love

“We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”

Carson McCullers book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Variant: The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

“The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.”

Milan Kundera book Immortality

Source: Immortality

“I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.”

Vikram Seth (1952) Indian writer

World, Future

“Remember this… develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you'll never figure out what's important.”

Gary Shteyngart Super Sad True Love Story

Source: Super Sad True Love Story

Sense

“Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Gift from the Sea

Source: Gift from the Sea

“… 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.”

Sherman Alexie (1966) Native American author and filmmaker

Source: Ten Little Indians

Heart

“Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 119
Context: In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death really did not matter to him but life did and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia. He did not speak until they asked him for his last request.

Life, Death, Fear, Feeling

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

Zeena Schreck (1963) Tantric Buddhist/Sethian

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

Milan Kundera book Ignorance

Source: Ignorance

Suffering

“Nobody felt sad as long as we could postpone tomorrow with more nostalgia.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Sadness

“It is in these moments of tender and ridiculous nostalgia that I know something inside me is still broken.”

Steve Almond (1966) American writer

Source: My Life in Heavy Metal: Stories

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

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Thinking, Memory

“When we are young… we often experience things in the present with a nostalgia-in-advance, but we seldom guess what we will truly prize years from now.”

Edmund White (1940) American novelist and LGBT essayist

Source: City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 70s

“The inside jokes weren't jokes anymore. They had become stories. Nobody brought up the bad names or the bad times. And nobody felt sad as long as we could postpone tomorrow with more nostalgia.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Sadness, Time

“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?”

Milan Kundera book Identity

pg 40
Source: Identity (1998)

Feeling, Suffering, Personality

“The school was nothing but reminiscence — of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia about somebody else's past.”

Edmund White book A Boy's Own Story

Source: A Boy's Own Story (1982), Chapter Six (p. 145).

School, Imagination, Past

“There has never been just one best way to teach quantum mechanics. My goal is neither to sow nostalgia for the philosophically engaged style of Oppenheimer and Nordheim, nor to condemn the pragmatic approach of Fermi, Bethe and Feynman. It is rather to highlight the choices that physicists must always make when stepping into the classroom. Choices of topics to discuss and problems to assign reflect deeper decisions about the ideal type of physicist one seeks to train. Should the new generation be philosophically attuned, concerned with minute details of conceptual interpretation? Or should physicists hone their ability to calculate, pushing Heisenberg’s and Schrödinger’s equations into the service of ever more elaborate problems to solve and phenomena to analyse? Competing ideals have flourished under different pedagogical conditions.”

David Kaiser (1971) American physicist

Turning physicists into quantum mechanics (2007)

Way, Problem, Decision, Training

“Ressentiment is always to some degree a determinant of the romantic type of mind. At least this is so when the romantic nostalgia for some past era (Hellas, the Middle Ages, etc.) is not primarily based on the values of that period, but on the wish to escape from the present. Then all praise of the “past” has the implied purpose of downgrading present-day reality.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 68

Age, Reality, Past

“We wallow in nostalgia but manage to get it all wrong. True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories […] but American-style nostalgia is about as ephemeral as copyrighted déjà vu.”

Florence King (1936–2016) American writer

"Déjà Views", in Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye (1989), p. 112

Memory

“Nostalgia is a form of depression both for a society and an individual.”

Abbie Hoffman (1936–1989) American political and social activist

Bye-Bye Sixties, Hollywood-Style, Square Dancing in the Ice Age (1982).

“Nostalgia is one of the legitimate and certainly one of the most enduring of human emotions; but the politics of nostalgia is at best distracting, at worst pernicious.”

Irving Kristol (1920–2009) American columnist, journalist, and writer

New York Times Magazine, December 20, 1964.
1960s

“Sharp nostalgia, infinite
And terrible, for what I already possess!”

Juan Ramón Jimenéz (1881–1958) Spanish poet

Nostalgia aguda, infinita,
terrible, de lo que tengo.
"South", in Poesía, en verso, 1917–1923 (1923), p. 97.

“When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

The Precession of Simulcra, The Divine Irreference Of Images
1980s, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

“If you say "90 miles" to any Cuban, they'll know exactly what it means. It's the stretch of water between Key West, which is the southernmost tip of the continental United States, and Cuba. And for any Cuban who cannot go back, it represents not just a physical distance, but a spiritual one. That's why in most of the songs there is the word "distancia." The idea was to take the nostalgia and the sounds that we started with on "Mi tierra,' which was meant to sound like it was made in a past era, and do the opposite. We moved forward to 2007, with the technological equipment we have today, and gave it a very vibrant sound.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

Latina Magazine (September, 2007)
2007, 2008

Idea, Water, Past

“We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of western European painting. Instead of making 'cathedrals' out of Christ, man, or 'life', we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings..”

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) American artist

Source: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 2. 1943-1945, p. 127

Life, Feeling, Memory, Christ

“Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what — it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

The New Gods (1969)

“[The hardest thing about '90 Millas' was the concept of] combining the old and the new without losing the authenticity. The simple solution, of course, would have been to record covers. [But] emotionally it wouldn't have been the same We left Cuba as children: Gloria was 1, I was 14. So, there ia a part that does exist in nostalgia, but a the same [time] there is another part that is contemporary music that we've made all over the world.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

Emilio Estefan, Reuters (July 23, 2007)
2007, 2008

Children, World, Music, Time

“When will you disembarrass yourselves of the lymphatic ideology of that deplorable Ruskin, which I would like to cover with so much ridicule that you would never forget it? With his morbid dream of primitive and rustic life, with his nostalgia for Homeric cheeses and legendary wool-spinners, with his hatred for the machine, steam power, and electricity, that maniac of antique simplicity is like a man who, after having reached full physical maturity, still wants to sleep in his cradle and feed himself at the breast of his decrepit old nurse in order to recover his thoughtless infancy.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

Quoted in: Anthony L. Geist, Jose B. Monle-N, Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America. Taylor & Francis, 1999, p. 57.
1910's, Futurist Speech to the English' (1910)

Life, Dreams, Sleep, Forgetting

“Listen to the flute it tells you a story' A story of nostalgia and separation.”

Mahmud Tarzi (1865–1933) Afghan writer

Mahmud Tarzi, poem written in Turkey. Article by Dr. Bashir Sakhwaraz, Role of Afghan Writiers in Afghan Inependence

“The prophecy of Professor Yeshayahu Leibovitz, that the occupation would corrupt us through and through and turn us into a people of exploiters and secret-service-men, has come awfully true. Nothing has remained of the "beautiful Eretz Israel " but a cloying nostalgia, of which Naomi Shemer was a standard-bearer. A small and gallant state, progressive and (relatively) egalitarian, respected by the world, has become an occupying and looting state, hostage to delirious settlers, full of internal violence and "swinish capitalism" (a phrase coined by Shimon Peres, one of those most responsible for this situation). Throughout the world, the idea of boycotting Israel is gaining ground.”

Uri Avnery (1923–2018) Israeli writer

Death of a Myth (May 12, 2005)

Men, People, Secret, World

“It is irrelevant in that ethnies arc constituted, not by lines of physical descent, but by the sense of continuity, shared memory and collective destiny, i. e. by lines of cultural affinity embodied in distinctive myths, memories, symbols and values retained by a given cultural unit of population. In that sense much has been retained, and revived, from the extant heritage of ancient Greece. For, even at the time of Slavic migrations, in Ionia and especially in Constantinople, there was a growing emphasis on the Greek language, on Greek philosophy and literature, and on classical models of thought and scholarship. Such a ‘Greek revival’ was to surface again in the tenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as subsequently, providing a powerful impetus to the sense of cultural affinity with ancient Greece and its classical heritage. This is not to deny for one moment either the enormous cultural changes undergone by the Greeks despite a surviving sense of common ethnicity or the cultural influence of surrounding peoples and civilizations over two thousand years. At the same time in terms of script and language, certain values, a particular environment and its nostalgia, continuous social interactions and a sense of religious and cultural difference, even exclusion, a sense of Greek identity and common sentiments of ethnicity can be said to have persisted”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: National Identity (1991), p. 30: About Ethnic Change, Dissolution and Survival

People, Literature, Sense, Memory

“It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn’t wait to leave.”

Anatole Broyard (1920–1990) American literary critic

New York Times 16th March 1973.

Love, Literature, Waiting

“I'm not pining for nostalgia back in the '50s and '60s, that isn't it. But that sensibility about how we were grounded here is so important. For instance, another American that was born in Waterloo was John Wayne. We were a very patriotic "yay rah rah America" city and nation and I think that's what America's looking for again.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

NBC News interview, quoted in * Wrong John Wayne: Mix-up is opening day headache for Bachmann
2011-06-27
First Read
NBC News
Carrie
Dann
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/27/6958622-wrong-john-wayne-mix-up-is-opening-day-headache-for-bachmann-
2011-06-27
Mixing up actor John Wayne with serial killer John Wayne Gacy
2010s, 2012 Presidential campaign

Thinking

“The professional and financial interest in continuing animal experimentation helps to explain at least some resistance to the notion that animals have a complex emotional life and are capable of experiencing the higher emotions, such as love, compassion, altruism, disappointment and nostalgia. To acknowledge such a possibility implies certain moral obligations. If chimpanzees can experience loneliness and mental anguish, it becomes more wrong to use them for experiments in which they are isolated and anticipate daily pain.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson book When Elephants Weep

Preface, p. 15
When Elephants Weep (1994)

Love, Life, Pain, Disappointment

“The nostalgia for Mao Zedong that we see in China today is in part a longing of the poor and downtrodden - the losers in the economic boom - for the egalitarianism an job security of the Mao era. But it is more than that. For the "patriots" in today's rabid nationalism, it is nostalgia for a time when China dared to say "no" to both of the world's superpowers, the Us. S. and the Soviet Union.”

Liu Xiaobo (1955–2017) Chinese literary critic, writer, professor, and human rights activist

"Bellicose and Thuggish: The Roots of Chinese "Patriotism" at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century" (2002)
No Enemies, No Hate: Selected Essays and Poems

World, Time, Parting

“The US — its bankrupt mortgage institutions nationalised and its gigantic war machine effectively funded by foreign borrowing — is in steep decline. With its financial system in the worst mess since the 1930s, the west's ability to shape events is dwindling by the day. Sermonising about "law-based international relations" is laughable after Iraq, and at bottom not much more than nostalgia for a vanished hegemony.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

"Folly of the progressive fairytale," The Observer (2008-09-08)

War, Law

“Does he [A N Wilson] really believe that there is no nostalgia for the triumphant days of the Third Reich among that proud and valorous race, or that they have forgiven and forgotten that in two great wars the English-speaking people beat the hell out of them, humiliated them, conquered them?”

George MacDonald Fraser (1925–2008) English-born author of Scottish descent

The Europe Fiasco. p. 76.
The Light's On At Signpost (2002)

War, People, Hell

“Actually, one of the real problems that always bothers me [in creating a painting] is sustaining a feeling. I mean, when I look at Poussin now, well, I think that's the most incredible thing to maintain the feeling for a year, however long it took Poussin, I'm telling you, to paint this vast structure. Bur perhaps that is not given to us now. I don't know…. Actually all all modern art puzzles me. I don't understand it. II really don't. I don't know whether it is fragmentary [as David Sylvester the interviewer suggested]. I have a sickening nostalgia for this other state of sustaining a feeling for months, being able to construct and build a picture. Well Mondrian, I think, did that, of course. He was almost one of the last artists to do that. I wish I could get there.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1950 - 1960, Interview with David Sylvester, BBC (March 1960), pp. 91-92

Art, Feeling, Understanding, Problem

“I never forgot that schooling had irretrievably changed my family’s life. That knowledge, however, did not weaken ambition. Instead, it strengthened resolve. Those times I remembered the loss of my past with regret, I quickly reminded myself of all the things my teachers could give me. (They could make me an educated man.) I tightened my grip on pencil and books. I evaded nostalgia. Tried hard to forget. But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers. I remembered too well that education had changed my family’s life. I would not have become a scholarship boy had I not so often remembered.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Life, Books, Education, School

“Many innovations of current history and philosophy of science were, in fact, anticipated in Neurath’s oeuvre. The rediscovery of Neurath was therefore not merely a phenomenon of academic nostalgia, but itself constitutes research into the conditions and possibilities of changing a paradigm in the philosophy of science.”

Friedrich Stadler (1951) Austrian historian

Friedrich Stadler (1996). "Otto Neurath—encyclopedia and utopia." In: E. Nemeth & F. Stadler (Eds.). Encyclopedia and utopia: The life and work of Otto Neurath (1882–1945), Boston: Kluwer. Stadler, 1996, p. 3

History, Science, Change

“"Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia."
"Huh?" I asked.
"You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."”

John Green book Looking for Alaska

Alaska Young and Miles "Pudge" Halter, p. 54
Looking for Alaska (2005)

Life, Imagination, Thinking, Future

“All you are seeing is your own nostalgia for your girlhood trips up here into the hills, which were no doubt colored with the pleasantries of youth and idealism, which is—won’t you admit it?—finally just a form of ignorance.”

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

Source: Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979), Chapter 2, “The Tale of Old Venn” Section 1 (p. 76)

Youth, Color

“[As a screenwriter] I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.”

Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) Novelist, screenwriter

"A Qualified Farewell" (essay, early 1950's), published in The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler (1976)

Way, Sense, Silence, Time

“Older cliches are retrieved both as inherent principles that inform the new ground and new awareness, and as archetypal nostalgia figures with transformed meaning in relation to the new ground.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 105

“Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we have never had, for the first involves knowledge and pleasure, the second only ignorance and pain.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Pain, Pleasure, Knowledge

“p>When I was small,
Nostalgia was a tiny postage stamp,
I, on this side,
My mother, on the other.Later on,
Nostalgia was a low tomb,
I, outside.
My mother, inside.And now,
Nostalgia is the coastline, a shallow strait.
I, on this side,
The mainland, on the other.”

Yu Kwang-chung (1928–2017) Taiwanese poet

"Nostalgia" (《乡愁》, "Xiangchou"), in The Isle Full of Noises: Modern Chinese Poetry from Taiwan, ed. and trans. Dominic Cheung (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 51

“Over the years I felt call to motherland that sometimes I even wanted to cry because of nostalgia. You will not believe but my present flat is a real Ukrainian house. I collect embroidered towels and embroidered shirts. More and more often I recollect the words of Nina Matvienko, whom I respect a lot: "Where your navel is dug there you will always feel a call."”

Yaroslav Alexandrovich Evdokimov (1946) Russian singer

And it is true.
Марчук Л. Ярослав Євдокимов: "Я пишаюсь тим, що я українець"/ Людмила Марчук // Рівне Час.
2007. - 11 жовтня. - С. 6.

Feeling, Housing, Cry

“Between the black of yesterday and the white of tomorrow is the great gray of today, filled with nostalgia and fear of the future.”

Roger Zelazny book He Who Shapes

He Who Shapes (1965)

Fear, Future

“Over the years, I've made a lot of predictions that have come true. Remember this one: two years from now, even those who supported Barack Obama most enthusiastically will be feeling a certain nostalgia about George W. Bush and secretly wishing they'd voted for John McCain.
Yeah, I know, disgusting. But that's the way the world works. Nobody alive today would willingly admit to voting for Adolf Hitler, although the third or fourth worst mass-murderer in history (behind Mao Tse Tung, Joseph Stalin, and, on a per capita basis, Pol Pot) won by a landslide. Once the outrages to come have ended and there are thousands — perhaps even millions — of Obama's crimes to account for, would you want to admit to having voted to make those crimes possible?”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Only Nixon".

World, Way, Feeling, History

“I know that something dies when i give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Stealing Books, p. 238.
A History of Reading (1996)

Books, Memory

“Tom Strong and the rest of the ABC bunch leave me cold for a lot of reasons. First—and I realize this is purely subjective, but what isn’t?—I find a smugness, a condescension that reads to me as nostalgia being done by someone who is not in the least bit nostalgic. Almost as if Moore sits down to write and flips his brain 180°, so he’s not really writing what he feels or what he likes, just the exact opposite of what he would usually write.

Also, there is the whole pastiche/homage/whatever thing. I find this really annoying. Not just when Moore does it. I can look back on elements of my own work and be annoyed at myself for going down that path. I only did it on rare occasions, tho. Moore has turned it into a career. So much so, that in the post-Watchmen era I have trouble calling to mind much that he has done that was not based on someone else’s previous work. I am not the most original guy on the block, but at least when I do Superman, I do Superman.

I suppose a lot of this could simply be the bad taste his earlier work left for me. All that tearing down and “deconstructionism.””

John Byrne (1950) American author and artist of comic books

All that revealing of the flaws and feet of clay, not a bit of which has served the industry in any positive way, and, in fact, has left huge scars across it, like the ones left in the landscape by open pit mining.
Alan Moore

Way, Guy, Feeling, Tear

“About the only power you have is the power to discriminate. Living in a culture like this, you have to make choices and search out what has the most authentic content or substance. In the 1960s, while on LSD, I realized that my mind was a garbage receptacle of mass media images and input. I spent my whole childhood absorbing so much crap that my personality and mind are saturated with it. God only knows if that affects you physically! As a kid I became increasingly interested in earlier periods of culture. I turned into a little nostalgia boy, and I became steeped in the Our Gang fantasy from watching them on TV. So much so, that my speech patterns were affected. The style of those Our Gang comedies was so charming that I started acting and talking like Jackie Cooper and Alfalfa. They had these cute kids, artificial mannerisms. It must have been embarrassing for people to hear me talk like that.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 60

God, People, Search, Boy

“Esperando (Cuando Cuba Sea Libre) is probably one of the most personal songs from the new [September, 2007] CD, "90 Millas"... as it really speaks about the celebration, nostalgia and emotion that will happen the day Cuba is free. If we're to move forward in Cuba, we really have to have a lot of forgiveness for each other and look towards the future.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

www.gloriaestefan.com (March 28, 2007)
2007, 2008

Forgiveness, Future, Personality, Sea

“There is a profound middle-class nostalgia for the days of British protection….”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

“The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 103

World

“Udnie – I see Again in Memory my Dear Udnie' is no more the portrait of a young girl than 'Edtaonisl' (counterpart of his work 'Udnie'] is the image of a prelate, as we ordinarily conceive of them. They are [both] memories of America, evocations of over there which, subtly set down like musical chords, become representative of an idea, a nostalgia, a fleeting impression.”

Francis Picabia (1879–1953) French painter and writer

'Udnie – I see Again in Memory my Dear Udnie' is the title of a painting, he made in 1913; a memory of the dances performed by Stasia Napierkowska on the ship to New York, to visit the w:Armory Show, where Picabia was presented in 1913 as a 'leading Cubist painter'
1910's
Source: 'Ecrits: vol. 1', 1913 - 1920, Picabia, Belfond, Paris, p. 26

Music, Girl, Idea, Memory

“Europeans had sometimes invited him to dinner and given him stuffed aubergines and onion soup and Nuits St Georges and what they said was good coffee.…They had evinced, in their curious French mixed with Malay (both were foreign languages, both occupied the same compartment, they were bound to get mixed), a nostalgia for France which amused him slightly, bored him much, flattered him not at all.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

Coffee

“Ostalgie [≈ “East German Nostalgia”] is not my kind of thing. To some, the GDR appears in a backward-looking bleary-eyed view as a palladium of social security. In truth, the GDR collapsed not least because, being economically inefficient, it could not finance its social promises.”

Günter Schabowski (1929–2015) German politician

Ostalgie ist nicht mein Ding. Manchem erscheint die DDR in rückblickender Verklärung als ein Hort sozialer Sicherheit. Tatsächlich ist die DDR nicht zuletzt daran zugrunde gegangen, dass sie infolge wirtschaftlicher Ineffizienz ihre sozialen Verheißungen nicht finanzieren konnte.
from: Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, 6 November 2004.

Truth, Appearance

“This is not to deny for one moment either the enormous cultural changes undergone by the Greeks despite a surviving sense of common ethnicity or the cultural influence of surrounding peoples and civilizations over two thousand years. At the same time in terms of script and language, certain values, a particular environment and its nostalgia, continuous social interactions, and a sense of religious and cultural difference, even exclusion, a sense of Greek identity and common sentiments of ethnicity can be said to have persisted beneath the many social and political changes of the last two thousand years”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: National Identity (1991), p. 31: About Ethnic Change, Dissolution and Survival

People, Sense, Change, Time

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. [Opening sentence. ]”

John Steinbeck book Cannery Row

Cannery Row (1945)

Dreams, Light

“Progress' constant companion is nostalgia for the way things used to be.”

Ira Glass (1959) American radio personality

"Pandora's Box", This American Life, television season 1, installment 6, 26 April 2007.
This American Life

Way

“"My field," said Goethe, "is time." That is indeed the absurd speech. What, in fact, is the Absurd Man? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reasoning. The first teaches him to live without appeal and to get along with what he has; the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future, and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime.”

Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Absurd Man

Courage, Freedom, Time, Future

“[On Jimmy Carter] "Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place."”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Brand, Stewart. "McLuhan's last words". New Scientist, 29 Jan 1981.
1980s

People, Loss

“Nothing has happened since two or three days.... nothing special, only the Ladies van Loon have visited me this morning, I have shown them a few of my studies, and talked a lot about [Huis] 't Velde and {[w|nl:Vorden|Vorden}}. Now I could tell you further, how little I still feel at home, how a certain nostalgia or quiet sorrow plunges me down, and how an indefinite hurry for an even more uncertain future dominates my whole [being? ]; but why should I bother You by telling You my inner life..”

Johannes Warnardus Bilders (1811–1890) painter from the Northern Netherlands

translation from Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek version in original Dutch (citaat van Johannes Warnardus Bilders' brief, in het Nederlands): Er is sedert de twee of drie dagen.. ..niets bijzonders voorgevallen, alleen de freules van Loon zijn heden morgen bij mij geweest, ik heb paar mijn studies laten zien, en verder veel over 't Velde en Vorden met hen gesproken; nu zou ik UE nog verder kunnen zeggen, hoe weinig ik mij nog te huis gevoel, hoe een zeker heimwee, of stil verdriet mij ter nederdrukt, en, hoe een onbestemd jagen, naar een nog onbestemder toekomst mijn gehele [aanschijn[?] beheerst; maar waar om zou ik UE vermoeijen; door UE mijn innerlijk leven mede te delen.. J.W. Bilders, in his letter [including a pencil-sketch of trees along a water] to Georgina van Dijk van 't Velde, from Castle Voorst in Warnsveld, 22 Oct. 1868; from an excerpt of the letter https://rkd.nl/nl/explore/excerpts/751208 in the RKD-Archive, The Hague In 1868 Bilders traveled to the North of The Netherlands, to make sketches 1860's + 1870's

Life, Feeling, Home, Study

“I am a 21st Century person who was accidentally launched in the 20th. I have a deep nostalgia for the future.”

FM-2030 (1930–2000) author, teacher, transhumanist philosopher, futurist and consultant

"Transhuman FM-2030" http://www.transhuman.org/transhumanfm-2030.htm, transhuman.org

Future, Personality

“Rather than the obsession with impurity, you'd do better to fear the nostalgia for purity.”

Georges Bernanos book Monsieur Ouine

The curé of Fenouille to Dr. Malépine, p. 213
Monsieur Ouine, 1943

Fear

“Nostalgia, as always, had wiped away bad memories and magnified the good ones.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Living to Tell the Tale

Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

Memory

“Since mobile, indie and retro inspired games are built on a legacy of inequality in the medium the new wave of 80s and 90s nostalgia has brought with it a resurrection of the worst of the old-school damsel in distress stereotypes. Indeed, many of these new titles essentially function as love letters to the trope as a way of paying homage to classic games of years gone by.”

Anita Sarkeesian (1983) American blogger

Damsel in Distress: Part 3 (Aug 1, 2013)
Tropes vs. Women in Video Games (Feminist Frequency, 2013 - 2015)

Love, School, Way, Game

“You have to understand the Tea-bagger mindset; they have this nostalgia for this America that they think was stolen from them, that used to be, that was better – it's really the 1950s, okay? That's what they think was Shangri-La, and, y'know what they really don't get is that it's kind of insulting to a lot of Americans to pine for this era, cause it wasn't that good for a lot of people. It was good if you were a white man. It wasn't that good if you were Mexican, or black, or Jewish, or disabled, or gay, or a woman.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

But I'm Not Wrong (2010)

People, Understanding, Thinking, Tea

“There was always something about Creative Commons and its name that bugged me, too. The name sounds like a variation of the once-powerful Common Cause political-action committee. A ring of days gone by — nostalgia. All I see here is making the very easy and simple U. S. copyright laws more complex for no apparent reason, except maybe as a protest.”

John C. Dvorak (1952) US journalist and radio broadcaster

"Creative Commons Humbug" in PC Magazine (18 July 2005) http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1838249,00.asp 2000s

Law

“During the war the congregation was largely broken up […] and it was never really reconstituted after the war. […] Before the war my parents (I, too) had known almost every shop and shopkeeper in Cricklewood […] and I would see them all in their places in shul. But all this was shattered with the impact of the war, and then with the rapid postwar social changes in our corner of London. I myself, traumatized at Braefield, had lost touch with, lost interest in, the religion of my childhood. I regret that I was to lose it as early and as abruptly as I did, and this feeling of sadness or nostalgia was strangely admixed with a raging atheism, a sort of fury with God for not existing, not taking care, not preventing the war, but allowing it, and all its horrors, to occur.”

Oliver Sacks book Uncle Tungsten

Source: Uncle Tungsten (2001), pp. 178–179

God, War, Sadness, Religion

“The scenic ideals that surround even our national parks are carriers of a nostalgia for heavenly bliss and eternal calmness.”

Robert Smithson (1938–1973) American artist

Cultural Confinement, 1972

“In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go.”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

"Introduction: The Decline of the City of Mahagonny"
Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

“You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

Identity (1998), p 40

Suffering, Future

“Oh, the way words lie down under decades, then the Union of Restless Diggers out of sheer insomnia pulls them up: daggers for the young but to us they look like flowers of nostalgia that grew in our mother’s foreign garden.”

Grace Paley (1922–2007) American writer and activist

"Listening"
Context: What is this crap, Mother, this life is short and terrible. What is this metaphysical shit, what is this disease you intelligentsia are always talking about.
First we said: Intelligentsia! Us? Oh, the way words lie down under decades, then the Union of Restless Diggers out of sheer insomnia pulls them up: daggers for the young but to us they look like flowers of nostalgia that grew in our mother’s foreign garden. What did my mother say? Darling, you should have come to Town Hall last night, the whole intelligentsia was there. My uncle, strictly: the intelligentsia will never permit it.!

Lie, Way, Flowers

“I think that the soul of fantasy—or second-world fantasy at least—is our problematic relationship with nostalgia.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Context: I don't find fantasy to be more or less suited to philosophical questions than any other genre, really. I think that the soul of fantasy—or second-world fantasy at least—is our problematic relationship with nostalgia. The impulse to return to a golden age seems to be pretty close to the bone, at least in western cultures, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's a human universal. For me, it's tied up with the experience of aging and the impulse to recapture youth. Epic fantasy, I think, takes its power from that. We create golden eras and either celebrate them or—more often—mourn their loss. Interview with Peter Orullian http://orullian.com/writing/danielabraham_interview.html

World, Soul, Thinking

“I was born in Havana and my family left when I was five-and-a-half. I remember the transition and some memories of being in Havana. I tried to analyze this and I think all exiles who have to leave a country you love, develop a profound nostalgia for where you were born but can no longer be there – like an impossible love. You protect those memories and don’t take them for granted. It’s different for someone who grew up and still lives in the same city because they do take their memories for granted. For me, I’m very nostalgic – not only about my time in Havana, but my 30 years in Miami Beach. All those memories are pretty vivid and I guard and cherish them. I also use those recollections in my work.”

Andy García (1956) American actor and director

On how he’s nostalgic about Cuba in “Andy Garcia Interview - Up Close And Personal” https://www.lasplash.com/publish/Celebrity_Talk_102/Andy_Garcia_Interview_-_Up_Close_And_Personal.php in Splash Magazines

Family, Time, Country, Thinking

“The happy days of Bretton Woods, often viewed today with nostalgia, were a special case, workable because of a particular economic and political setting… the inherent contradictions in the system were too great. With the benefit of hindsight, it would seem that an erosion of the United States competitive position was implicit in the postwar arrangements.”

Paul Volcker (1927–2019) American economist

The political economy of the dollar

Happiness

“In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death really did not matter to him but life did and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia. He did not speak until they asked him for his last request.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 119

Fear, Time, Making love, Decision