“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.”

Source: An Unnecessary Woman

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

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

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

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

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

Is It Bill Bailey? (TV, 1998)

Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

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