“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.”

“We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.”

“I suppose we would be monsters to a Venusian. [...] We depicted the outer space creature as something strange rather than as a monster. He was from a strange place and therefore out of place in our familiar surroundings.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Is it not strange that we fear most that which never happens?”

“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.”

“I mistrust illuminations: what we take for a discovery is very often only a familiar thought that we have not recognized.”

“Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.”

“Torn between the impulse to stroke his head, and the urge to cave it in with a rock, I did neither.”