Quotes & Sayings About Nostalgic

The words 'Space Age' have a quaint, nostalgic tone - sitting on midcentury modern furniture watching 'The Jetsons.' — P. J. O'Rourke

Few things in nature can compare to the long, mournful wail of a loon echoing across water and through the forest. It's an evocative sound that will stick with you for the rest of your life and make you nostalgic for things that never even happened to you. Eerie, yet beautiful, the sound will conjure up images of solitude near mountain lakes and ponds, shrouded in fog during the early morning or late dusk, surrounded by the silhouettes of pine trees. It's a sound that relaxes and submerges you into the tranquility of nature. I don't think there is another sound in the world that reminds me of the wilderness more so than the wail of a loon. — Kyle Rohrig

I'll put it out there: I am scarred by the nostalgic indicipherability of my own desires; I an engulfed by the intimidating unknown, pushed through darkness and dragged down by the irretrievable past sweetness of my memories. — Anne Sexton

One reason that Americans as a people became nostalgic about the fifties more than twenty-five years later was not so much that life was better in the fifties (though in some ways it was), but because at the time it had been portrayed so idyllically on television. — David Halberstam

These stories at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationary store, when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke to the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like 'the Cleveland Chicken,' sail for Europe on ships, who were nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are. — John Cheever

That person who's going to a concert for a nostalgic reason, we're not really going to placate. We still play three or four hits every night. Now, we don't play them like the record. We try to find new ways to do it. — Bruce Hornsby

If we could all take a sober look at our history, then we would no longer see this nostalgic attitude to the Soviet past that predominates among the less affected part of our society. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It's never safe to be nostalgic about something until you're absolutely certain there's no chance of its coming back — Bill Vaughan

Most people are nostalgic in a way that they're fond of the past, but they still are happy that they are where they are now. You know, when you say, 'Oh, high school was this or that,' you don't want to go back. No matter how much you loved high school, you don't want to actually be back in high school. I certainly wouldn't. — Jason Reitman

Never look back; you may only find what you left or let you go. — Stefanos Livos

To write, I need to remember, but I write to forget. I drink to forget, then get nostalgic when I'm drunk. — Shoshaku Jushaku

You can be aware of the passing of time without being nostalgic. — Ira Sachs

... and now and then we could look up and give each other a thought,
because I think he could have beautiful thoughts,
and we could just let each other be less lonely in our loneliness. — Charlotte Eriksson

Boss, what, exactly, are we doing here?" "Feeling maudlin." "Oh. Good. How long are we planning on doing that?" "Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" "What?" "Never mind. — Steven Brust

There are a few moments in your life when you are truly and completely happy, and you remember to give thanks. Even as it happens you are nostalgic for the moment, you are tucking it away in your scrapbook. — David Benioff

She's taken to renaming him according to her own analysis of his mood of the day, or his mood of the hour, or his mood of the minute: according to her, he's moody. Each mood is personified and given an honorific, so he's Mr. Grumpy, Mr. Sleepy, Dr. Ironic, Sir Sardonic, and sometimes, when she's being sarcastic or possibly nostalgic, Mr. Romantic. — Margaret Atwood

I'm convinced that without bad design, the world would be a far less stimulating place; we would have nothing to marvel over and nothing to be nostalgic about. — Carrie Fulton Phillips

In time, foods such as hamburgers and ice cream became more than just meals. They became part of American history and culture, touchstones that are almost immediately nostalgic and sentimental no matter how old you are or what part of the country you are from. — Homaro Cantu

I get emotional when young people get nostalgic about my work. That's why it's called nostalgia. Sometimes I even cry. — Mithun Chakraborty

[Nostalgic sentiments] are nothing other than the rosy illumination of a past that has been spared the shadows of the present. — Georg Simmel

Your voice so sweet and tender whispers lovely lullabies.
Making me swoon in awe as we dream under the night skies.
Leaving me nostalgic until we both say our goodbyes.
Kissing away our dreams as we wipe the tears from our eyes.
Wishing upon each star until the sunrise. — Raneem Kayyali

There are a lot of them, all around the wsorld, all built a lifetime ago, during the long and spectacular blaze of American military power and self-confidence, when there was nothing we couldn't or wouldn't do. I was a product of that era, but not a part of it. I was nostalgic for something I had never experienced. — Lee Child

'Moving Pictures' still makes me get into a groove; I love the way it feels. But I'm not nostalgic for old times. I'd love to have that hair again and be 40 pounds lighter, but it's a tradeoff. — Alex Lifeson

I love the ZX Spectrum. I love it with the sort of wistful passion that can only take root in the heart of a hopelessly nostalgic nerd. It was my first computer love, my first games machine, my first gateway to a hobby that has somehow also been my living for over twenty years. I owe it all to that flat black biscuit, throbbing with 48k of raw power. — Dan Whitehead

I don't know if I am romanticizing, mythologizing, or being nostalgic. I assume all three. That seems to be how the brain breaks things down after a certain age. I — Marc Maron

Oh how lovely to hear the birds!' an elderly friend recently exclaimed. I smiled, 'Yes, isn't it?' Actually it reminded me of living in my ex's flat; those early mornings being woken up by the incessant chirping of baby birds and myself at the window with an air rifle. Good times. Because that's the other thing about working alone for long periods of time, you begin to get nostalgic about all the rubbish. — Emily Benet

I love to look back, but I don't want my music to be nostalgic. I want it to have the same vibrancy that the music I love had when it came out. I'm trying to get that electricity. — Imelda May

Suddenly I was nostalgic for something I'd never known. — Rick Riordan

Construed as turf, home just seems a provisional claim, a designation you make upon a place, not one it makes on you. A certain set of buildings, a glimpsed, smudged window-view across a schoolyard, a musty aroma sniffed behind a garage when you were a child, all of which come crowding in upon your latter-day senses
those are pungent things and vivid, even consoling. But to me they are also inert and nostalgic and unlikely to connect you to the real, to that essence art can sometimes achieve, which is permanence. — Richard Ford

It's very intense to go back to the past and revive work that I've already experienced and moved forward from. It's like seeing an old girlfriend - awkward at times, nostalgic at times and downright maddening and embarrassing. — Barry McGee

What we see is what they're trying to sell us. It's not true nostalgic as much as it is repeating old material because it's less expensive than new material. — Rick Moranis

At the danger of waxing nostalgic about the 'old days,' I don't want to be like everyone else. I want acceptance, but I want acceptance of my difference, not my sameness. It's a funny contract. The cultural machine wants to chew everyone up and turn them into this uniform little substance. — Alison Bechdel

My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign. — Jonathan Lethem

Nor am I nostalgic, as a French philosopher once wrote, for a lost poverty. I am nostalgic for the solidarity and sharing a modest existence can sometimes bring. — Alice Walker

A work of art rests its merits in traditional qualities. It may constitute a remarkable feat in craftsmanship; it may be a searching study of psychological states; it may be a nostalgic glance backward; it may be any one of an infinite number of concepts, none of which may have any possible bearing upon its degree of newness. — Ben Shahn

I am not nostalgic about things. When you have a kind of improvement, I am not nostalgic about the past. — Pierre Boulez

When you get divorced and you don't get the house (which I never did), you leave behind all sorts of things you don't have the sense to know you'll someday wonder about, or wish you still had, or, worst of all, feel genuinely nostalgic for. — Nora Ephron

Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action. — Jaron Lanier

To get nostalgic about other people's music, or even about your own, makes a terrible statement about the condition of your life and your prospects for the future. I have no patience with that kind of attitude, whether it's on radio or among friends. — Neil Peart

I was actually pretty miserable in high school. I couldn't wait for it to be over. And when it finally was, I remember sitting at graduation with all these classmates getting nostalgic and emotional already and all I could think was, "Get me out of here. I never want to see you people again." So it's ironic that I spend half my day putting myself back there by choice [while writing]. — Sarah Dessen

Before hoarding became a phenomenon, people just called it "collecting" or "being nostalgic." I don't hoard, exactly, but I get it. It's a response to our need and desire for purpose, order, definition, and a fortress. It's a calling that requires constant management, control, and obsessive attention. I am amassing artifacts from the history of me. My garage is the storeroom and temporary exhibition hall of the yet-to-be-built museum documenting the rise and fall of the Marc Age. I am the curator. I decide the meaning and worth of the collection based on my feelings in a moment. — Marc Maron

Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar ... — William Faulkner

I'm not really a nostalgic person. — Patti Smith

Perhaps the most powerful Tollean insight into the ego was that it is obsessed with the past and the future, at the expense of the present. We "live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation," he wrote. We wax nostalgic for prior events during which we were doubtless ruminating or projecting. We cast forward to future events during which we will certainly be fantasizing. But as Tolle pointed out, it is, quite literally, always Now. (He liked to capitalize the word.) The present moment is all we've got. We experienced everything in our past through the present moment, and we will experience everything in the future the same way. — Dan Harris

I am not a nostalgic person. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

I was so utterly content that I was slightly wistful. It was the feeling I got when I was about to finish a really great book. I was nostalgic for this moment even as I was still in it. — Noelle Hancock

Dinner with Steven Moffat in Bar Shu, spent mostly in enthusiastic Dr Who neepery. I love my life ... As a side note, running Windows Vista on the Panasonic w7 is making me really nostalgic for 1986. Whoever thought I'd get to type things then stare at a blank screen for a bit and one-by-one watch the letters appear? Cory and Mike's 'Why Don't You Run Linux?' talks are staring to seem much more sensible. — Neil Gaiman

A gaze to stop still, wonder at the shimmering depths.
A memory near the amygdala stored, an unforgettable tune,
Such an image did it impress, your sweet nostalgic scents. — Selina A. Mahmood

Minor Threat was an important band, believe me that it was important it in my life, but it belongs to an era that no longer exists. I'm not nostalgic. I think music today is much more important, because something can be done about it. — Ian MacKaye

I think people get excited about someone discovering something that blew their mind when they were younger. I think it makes people kind of nostalgic and happy. That's one of the really great things about the Internet, that it can bring people together in that way of just being interested in the same stuff. — Tavi Gevinson

Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies. — Simone De Beauvoir

Always. At every moment, asleep and awake, during the most sublime and most abject moments, Amaranta thought of Rebeca, because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I took a great deal of pleasure in it, and I still feel nostalgic about it. However, I felt that it had led me to live in a parallel world of pure invention, shut inside my solitude. Naturally, it was precisely for that purpose that it was made and that was why I took pleasure in it, but I wanted to regain body and roots. — Jean Dubuffet

Maybe I'm getting to the age when I'm starting to be senile or nostalgic or both, but people are so angry now. You used to be able to disagree with people and still be friends. Now you hear these talk shows, and everyone who believes differently from you is a moron and an idiot - both on the Right and the Left. — Clint Eastwood

Could you be nostalgic for a friendship that wasn't over yet or did the fact that you were nostalgic mean that it already was? — Brit Bennett

People talk about the 1960s in a nostalgic way, but to me it was terrifying. People were getting assassinated. There was Vietnam. There were race riots. It felt like everything was going to get blown up sky-high. It didn't feel like flower power. It felt like Armageddon. — Sam Shepard

It was Christmas night in the Castle of the Forest Sauvage, and all around length. It hung on the boughs of the forest trees in rounded lumps, even better than apple-blossom, and occasionally slid off the roofs of the village when it saw the chance of falling on some amusing character and giving pleasure to all. The boys made snowballs with it, but never put stones in them to hurt each other, and the dogs, when they were taken out to scombre, bit it and rolled in it, and looked surprised but delighted when they vanished into the bigger drifts. There was skating on the moat, which roared with the gliding bones which they used for skates, while hot chestnuts and spiced mead were served on the bank to all and sundry. The owls hooted. The cooks put out plenty of crumbs for the small birds. The villagers brought out their red mufflers. Sir Ector's face shone redder even than these. And reddest of all shone the cottage fires down the main street of an evening, — T.H. White

HE: History has no smell.
ME: Is that why we are nostalgic for it?
HE: Breathe in, breathe out. The past doesn't stink like the present. — Jeanette Winterson

For years it seemed to me that this period had become a recurrent nightmare that I had almost every night, because I would wake in the morning feeling the same terror I had felt in the room with the saint. During my adolescence, when I was a student at an icy boarding school in the Andes, I would wake up crying in the middle of the night. I needed old age without remorse to understand that the misfortune of my grandparents in the house in Catasa was that they were always mired in their nostalgic memories, and the more they insisted on conjuring them, the deper they sank. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I think I now understand why it is that the young are so very nostalgic. They have so little by way of personal history that they polish it up and make it shine like a treasured heirloom. — Will Self

All couples get nostalgic about the start of their story. — David Levithan

Elise asked what nostalgic meant, and Jewel said, It's where you think the past was better than it really was, only because the present sucks so bad. — Hugh Howey

From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think. — Simon Schama

I would hate to have parents who were always looking over my shoulder, reading my diary, checking my thoughts. I would hate to be exposed. And so, perhaps, when I say I long to be a pane of glass, I am lying. I long for partial obscurity at the same time that I long for someone to know me.
It is confusing and difficult to be me.
Sometimes I I need to cry in order to release the great welling sadness I feel in my head.
For this I need privacy. I do not want anyone to see me and ask why, almost as much as I would like to be comforted.
Somehow, without ever being present, Matthew has exposed all of this, brought it wriggling to the surface like worms. They gather there now, vaguely nostalgic for the dark. — Meg Rosoff

There are so few people left alive from back then, you may as well be talking to them about the Black Death. Nobody recalls the shite in the 30s and that were fucking horrible. For Christ's sake, nobody wants to remember the shite in the 80s. It's all forgotten and swept under the rug by the newspapers and the BBC. They get nostalgic about the music, but they never want to mention the misery. It's all shite. As for the bloody Second World War, the politicians only talk about it when they need an excuse to go pissing about in one of those fucking Muslim countries. — Harry Leslie Smith

There's something about the sound of a train that's very romantic and nostalgic and hopeful. — Paul Simon

Unreal. I'm feeling nostalgic for something that happened less than twenty-four hours ago. This has got to be a record. — Barry Lyga

I get nostalgic for things that didn't really exist. I might have a cassette from the first time a Melle Mel track, say, got played on radio in Manchester. And it might be a copy of a copy of a copy of a tape and there's all these weird nuances and distortions that have affected what I know as the truth, if you like, of that track. — Rob Brown

Saudade.
A nostalgic longing to be near again to something or someone that is distant, or that has been loved and then lost; "the love that remains". — Anonymous

The Bush administration made us nostalgic for ... well, any other time in history. — Hal Sparks

I always have been and will remain someone who loves real, 3D, substantial books. And I don't believe that it's a wistful, nostalgic interest like vinyl collectors. It's not the same thing. — Art Spiegelman

I like the present. I'm always interested in new ideas, and what's happening. I'm not nostalgic. — Douglas Coupland

My audience is made up of two groups of people. The first group includes people whose roots are deep in the Christian faith, but for whom the traditional symbols, as traditionally understood, no longer make sense. The other audience is the audience that has left. I call them the Church Alumni Association, citizens of the secular city. They are a bit nostalgic about this faith of their childhood, but they aren't really interested in trotting it out or becoming involved with it again as it is presently organized. — John Shelby Spong

Usually, we have some of those nostalgic moments like, "Oh my god, I can't believe we survived that day," because filmmaking is such a wild roller coaster ride. — Catherine Hardwicke

I'm not a nostalgic person for the glory days of 8-track sales at the local K-Mart. But there's a little bit of flattery and a little bit of horror. It's a mixture. It's like sublime shock and awe, but also terror. That's always the way I feel about how music flows through those types of networks. I'm mostly cool with it, but I definitely appreciate when people support the work. — Tim Hecker

Reaganism as a political movement has enormous resources behind it and it seeks - through stagecraft and through a tremendous level of effort toward propaganda - to present an image of Reagan that is so much larger-than-life that it sort of blinds us all, and keeps us all in a warm, happy, nostalgic state, thinking of a man who can do no wrong. — Eugene Jarecki

It's curious the way we get nostalgic for some hoped-for thing that never happened, as if something that never happened were in the past. — Robert Breault

Cabel felt the familiar nostalgic excitement of the endless possibilities encapsulated in a summers' night at Silver Beach. He smiled at himself as a boy and, more ruefully, at the man who now stood on the worn planks of the boardwalk. This night held no possibilities for him, though it was pleasant to remember a time when it did. — Erin Farwell

Traveling to Europe and traveling in the U.S.A. was a much different experience. 'On the Road' exemplified everything glamorous that was happening on this side of the planet. The book puts off some kind of sweet melody - part hope for the world, part nostalgic. — Edward Ruscha

If you're serious about shaking off your foreignness, Salad baba, then don't fall into some kind of rootless limbo instead. Okay? We're all here. We're right in front of you. You should really try and make an adult acquaintance with this place, this time. Try and embrace this city, as it is, not some childhood memory that makes you both nostalgic and sick. Draw it close. The actually existing place. — Salman Rushdie

I was so incredibly nostalgic for a life I knew I'd never, ever have again. — Paige Harbison

The phrase 'blue plate special' has always been one of the homiest, coziest, most sweetly nostalgic phrases in the English language for me. — Kate Christensen

I'm not nostalgic for my glory days in college. It was lame for me. Probably because I had no friends. — Alex Honnold

Whenever I'm around people it causes me to feel nostalgic for the loneliness that drove me into their presence in the first place. — Dov Davidoff

There is something incredibly nostalgic and significant about the annual cascade of autumn leaves. — Joe L. Wheeler

Books have a smell, for instance. One that gets better - more nostalgic - as the years go by. Does this gadget of yours have a smell?" "Nope, — Stephen King

If anyone looks back to the '70s, '80s with nostalgic rosy colored glasses and goes, 'Well, everything was awesome.' No, everything was not awesome! — John Oates

I don't like coming home. It keeps me from being nostalgic, which by nature I am. Even before the plane begins its descent, I find myself dreading the questions left unanswered by my childhood. — Stewart O'Nan

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled. — Diane Setterfield

I am ever nostalgic for a childhood which I never had the pleasure of having. — Cheri Bauer

The fact that people still know us is, in my opinion, a result of our music and of the big money that runs the music industry today. The people who control the industry are accountants who recycle everything in new, nostalgic packages, and everything else, to make more money. — Rick Wright

I can be nostalgic for the past, and I can romanticize the future, but I cannot sugar coat the here and now. I think that's why I try not to think about it, and I think that's the exact same reason why I need to. — Ellie Rose McKee

You make me nostalgic for a love that hasn't even happened yet. — Pleasefindthis

My landscapes are not only beautiful, or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all 'untruthful.' By 'untruthful,' I mean the glorifying way we look at Nature. Nature, which in all its forms is always against us, because it knows no meaning, no pity, no sympathy, because it knows nothing and is absolutely mindless, the total antithesis of ourselves. — Gerhard Richter

Did you see the statue topple? Bill Clinton got nostalgic seeing something that big in a beret go down. — Craig Kilborn

His boredom was like a nostalgia for the whole world. He was homesick for everywhere but here. — Christopher Isherwood

I think a lot of times when people talk about merchants, it's almost a nostalgic look back at the time where the world moved at a very different pace, and information was very different. — Edward Lampert

I love looking at the old Bond films. Maybe it's purely out of reminiscence, the nostalgic things you think about. But there were some very good films made, and I think that the public has enjoyed them, too. — Albert R. Broccoli

I don't listen to punk any more, unless it's right before I play. Not that I don't like it, it's nostalgic. But, it's for kids and it should be ... it's not art, it's expression. — Tom DeLonge

In town, there's a tiny beach that's never busy, not even in the summer.

I used to like walking there, looking for stuff.

Like old fireworks.

Or kelp.

A hat knocked off someone's head by the wind.

You basically never find what you were expecting to.

And maybe you weren't expecting to find anything right from the start... — Inio Asano