nostalgia

It is not settled happiness but momentary joy that glorifies the past.

For youth, the moon is a promise of all those tremendous things which await it, for older people a memento that the promise was never kept, a reminder of all that broke and went to pieces...And what is moonshine? Secondhand sunshine. Diluted, counterfeit.

The staying awake was a great self-sacrificaing gesture of friendship, and wonderfully in keeping with our current mood of intense friendship and religious fervour. We were all in a state of shock. We engaged in a long Dostojevskyan conversations and drank one black coffee after another. It was sort of night typical of youth, the sort you only can look back on with shame and embarassment once you've grown up. But God knows, I must have grown up already by then, because I don't feel the slightest embarassment when I think back to it, just a terrible nostalgia.

I was born in the age of "alas".

There is no cause for nostalgia save the good and life-enhancing nostalgia for the present.

I would even argue that, for many displaced people, nostalgia is also blended with fear - the fear of uncertainty and of facing the challenges posed by the larger world and the fear of the absence of the clarity and confidence provided by the past. In essence, nostalgia is associated mostly with the experience of a particular type of migrants, namely, exiles.

The days of my youth, as I look back on them; seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation can.

I hate being so nostalgic about the Sixties.

Woman lost (skin deep) like a damn fine thread in the fireWoman of the world caught up in your black machinationsI was a woman who cried alone at night, who gave it all away when she saw the good heart of the man insideWoman caught standing up; her open parts are broken -

The existence of flying saucers is unlikely to be verified by an accumulation of facts and figures, dates and times, which, if anything, tend to dull and distract the creative intelligence, obscuring more than they reveal.

1980's: not a time period but a state of mind.

Michael [Hutchence] is hands down one of the greatest frontmen in music. The style, the voice__ll of it. Any way that I was ever influenced by him really comes down to small, pale imitations compared to the real thing. There is a fearlessness about him. Watching him at Wembley Stadium with 70,000 people, he looks as comfortable as if he were in his own living room.

I slept that night in the room I used to have when I was a little boy, with the summer wind blowing in at the windows, bringing the smell of the ripe fields. I lay awake and watched the moonlight shining over the barn and the stacks and the pond, and the windmill making its old dark shadow against the blue sky.

Fyodor Pavlovitch was drunk when he heard of his wife's death, and the story is that he ran out into the street and began shouting with joy, raising his hands to Heaven: "Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace," but others say he wept without restraint like a little child, so much so that people were sorry for him, in spite of the repulsion he inspired. It is quite possible that both versions were true, that he rejoiced at his release, and at the same time wept for her who released him.

I didn't really want to come back here and again have to feel like my lungs were drowning in this perverse nostalgia.

It's just odd being a guest at the wedding. When you dreamed about it for so long, even if you we're a different person, and it was years ago. Sounds so stupid. I was stupid.

For a long moment we didn't move. We just stared at each other. So much time had passed since our eyes last met. So much had changed. I turned away and pressed my head to the cold window pane. I traced my initials onto the misted glass and, as they began to fade, He reached out his fingers and retraced my signature. I watched it fade once more and felt his moist fingers brush against my lips. He let them linger there a moment, then replaced them with his own lips. Then I woke up.

Ludwik Szatera was a passionate lover of nostalgia. He could never come to terms with the eternal passage of men, objects and events. Each moment inexorably turning into the past was to him precious, invaluable, and he witnessed its passing with a sense of inexpressible regret.