A feeling of sadness and longing that is not akin to pain, and resembles sorrow only as the mist resembles the rain.
A society that has made ''nostalgia'' a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.
Ah tell me not that memory sheds gladness over the past; what is recalled by faded flowers save that they did not last?
Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother's cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.
For us, the best time is always yesterday.
I don't like nostalgia unless it's mine.
I wept as I remembered how often you and I had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. 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.
Oh, for boyhood's painless play, sleep that wakes in laughing day, health that mocks the doctor's rules, knowledge never learned of schools.
People have this obsession. They want you to be like you were in 1969. They want you to, because otherwise their youth goes with you. It's very selfish, but it's understandable.
Remembrance of things past.
That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot come again.
The ''good old times'' — all times when old are good.
Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind. 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 dTja vu.
To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward.
When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.