Nostalgia Quotes - Page 19

• The school was nothing but reminiscence - of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia about somebody else's past.

  Edmund White

  School, Italian, Past

  Edmund White (2016). “A Boy's Own Story: Picador Classic”, p.102, Pan Macmillan

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• Nostalgia is one of the legitimate and certainly one of the most enduring of human emotions; but the politics of nostalgia is at best distracting, at worst pernicious.

  Irving Kristol

  Emotion, Endure, Worst

  New York Times Magazine, December 20, 1964.

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• Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he [Jimmy Carter] puts nostalgia in its place.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Loss, Men, People

  "McLuhan's last words". "New Scientist" Magazine, January 29, 1981.

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• No other serial publications carry a number on them that is of any weight to their readership. The number is there to serve a function, but it has no intrinsic value in and of itself. It's comfort food and nostalgia at best. On this, we follow what you and your fellow readers do more than what you say. We hear complaints about renumbering every time we do it, but every time we do it it results in higher sales, which is the whole ballgame - so if it were your time and your effort, what would you do?

  Tom Brevoort

  Book, Numbers, Effort

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• I think it's very disheartening and undermining to focus on nostalgia or youthful sentimentality as the lens through which you view art and culture, because then you feel like everything good already happened. I really just try to be in the present with music and just find the things that are invigorating and make me feel happy to be alive right now.

  Carrie Brownstein

  Art, Thinking, Views

  "'Portlandia' Duo Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein Discuss the Secrets to the Cult Show's Success". Interview with Marlow Stern, www.thedailybeast.com. February 27, 2014.

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• When will you disembarrass yourselves of the lymphatic ideology of that deplorable Ruskin, which I would like to cover with so much ridicule that you would never forget it? With his morbid dream of primitive and rustic life, with his nostalgia for Homeric cheeses and legendary wool-spinners, with his hatred for the machine, steam power, and electricity, that maniac of antique simplicity is like a man who, after having reached full physical maturity, still wants to sleep in his cradle and feed himself at the breast of his decrepit old nurse in order to recover his thoughtless infancy.

  Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

  Dream, Sleep, Men

  "Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America" by Anthony L. Geist, Jose B. Monle-N, Taylor & Francis, (p. 57), 1999.

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• Reading Ngo Tu Lap's poems, terrible nostalgia wells up in me- nostalgia for a lost time and a far-gone country, nostalgia for people I've loved, and for creatures of forests and rivers. I feel gratitude too. War is over. Peace arrives with these beautiful poems.

  Maxine Hong Kingston

  Beautiful, Country, Gratitude

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• Several sorts of memory exist in us; body and mind each possesses one peculiar to itself. Nostalgia, for instance, is a malady of the physical memory.

  Honore de Balzac

  Memories, Mind, Peculiar

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• There is no word for feeling nostalgic about the future, but that's what a parent's tears often are, a nostalgia for something that has not yet occurred. They are the pain of hope, the helplessness of hope, and finally, the surrender to hope.

  Michael Ian Black

  Pain, Parent, Feelings

  Michael Ian Black (2012). “You're Not Doing It Right: Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death, and Other Humiliations”, p.106, Simon and Schuster

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• A unipolar world - one with only one power - makes sure that this space almost disappears. In a multipolar world this space multiplies. Therefore, there is nostalgia for a multipolar world.

  Eduardo Galeano

  Space, World, Disappear

  Source: apracticalpolicy.org

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• .. . . would I were
  In Grantchester, in Grantchester!

  Rupert Brooke

  Longing

  Rupert Brooke (2007). “1914 & Other Poems”, p.60, Jeremy Mills Publishing

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• To anybody who can hold the Present at its worth without being inappreciative of the Past, it may be forgiven, if to such an one the solitary old hulk at Portsmouth, Nelson's Victory, seems to float there, not alone as the decaying monument of a fame incorruptible, but also as a poetic approach, softened by its picturesqueness, to the Monitors and yet mightier hulls of the European ironclads.

  Herman Melville

  Past, Victory, Hull

  Herman Melville (2016). “Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories”, p.166, Penguin

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• We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.

  Adrienne Rich

  Life, Memories, Way

  Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.25, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Southern writing is regional: it includes dialect, settings, and cultural traditions from that region. However the themes and story conflicts are universal. My challenge is to write regional fiction without falling into the trap of nostalgia. There are important issues facing the south that I believe should be raised in the stories to make them contemporary, believable, and relevant to today's readers.

  Mary Alice Monroe

  Fall, Believe, Writing

  Source: www.maryannhenry.com

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• Why does the past look so enticing to us? For the same reason why from a distance a meadow with flowers looks like a flower bed.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Distance, Flower, Past

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• We all accuse Vladimir Putin of Cold War nostalgia, but Washington's elites - politicians and intellectuals - miss the old days as well. They wish for the world in which the United States was utterly dominant over its friends, its foes were to be shunned entirely, and the challenges were stark, moral, and vital. Today's world is messy and complicated. China is one of our biggest trading partners and our looming geopolitical rival. Russia is a surly spoiler, but it has a globalized middle class and has created ties in Europe.

  Fareed Zakaria

  Leadership, Money, War

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• War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.

  Don DeLillo

  Country, War, Men

  Don DeLillo (2011). “White Noise”, p.286, Pan Macmillan

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• The problem with relying on nostalgia for commentary is that people only remember the good things.

  Richie Benaud

  People, Remember, Problem

  Interview With Jim White, www.theguardian.com. August 5, 2001.

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• One day we're going to look back at $1,700 with nostalgia. People are going to be shocked at how inexpensive gold was when it could be snapped up for such a bargain price.

  Peter Schiff

  People, One Day, Gold

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• I grew up in Britain before it became a multicultural place, so in many ways I have a nostalgia for an England that's vanished - the England of my childhood has actually disappeared.

  Kazuo Ishiguro

  Childhood, Way, England

  "I Remain Fascinated by Memory". Interview with Michael Scott Moore and Michael Sontheimer, www.spiegel.de. October 5, 2005.

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• The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Hope, Hurt, Regret

  Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith (1996). “Book of Disquietude”, Carcanet Press Limited

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• Many of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Real, Past, Secret

  Barbara Kingsolver (2010). “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Our Year of Seasonal Eating”, p.179, Faber & Faber

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• Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or don't), care about birthdays, waste and lose time, brush their teeth, feel nostalgia, scrub stains, have religions and political parties and laws, wear keepsakes, apologize years after an offense, whisper, fear themselves, interpret dreams, hide their genitalia, shave, bury time capsules, and can choose not to eat something for reasons of conscience. The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Dream, Children, Party

  "Eating Animals". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, November 2, 2009.

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• The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else's nostalgia

  Pete Hamill

  Fighting, Way

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• Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.

  Derek Walcott

  Art, Church, Village

  Derek Walcott, “From 'Omeros'”

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