Source: Mary
Source: 2000s, Anti-Americanism (2003), p. 156
The Rock That is Higher: Story as Truth (1993)
Context: We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes…
“Nostalgia: How long's that been around?”
Is It Bill Bailey? (TV, 1998)
Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 4
Context: Since movement is a metaphor for change, the best thing will be to say: nonchange is (always) change. It would appear that I have finally arrived at the desired disequilibrium. Nonetheless, change is not the primordial, original word that I am searching for: it is a form of becoming. When becoming is substituted for change, the relation between the two terms is altered, so that I am obliged to replace nonchange by permanence, which is a metaphor for fixity, as becoming is for coming-to-be, which in turn is a metaphor for time in all its ceaseless transformations…. There is no beginning, no original word: each one is a metaphor for another word which is a metaphor for yet another, and so on. All of them are translations of translations. A transparency in which the obverse is the reverse: fixity is always momentary.
I begin all over again: if it does not make sense to say that fixity is always momentary, the same may not be true if I say that it never is.
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
“Nobody felt sad as long as we could postpone tomorrow with more nostalgia.”
Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Source: The Trouble with Being Born
“The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another.”
Fisherman's Luck http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/fshlk10.txt, ch. 5 (1899)
Context: The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another. The difference between them is sometimes as great as a month.
