nostalgia

Allie sighed. It was an old yellow sound, like turning pages.

Puberty flicked a switch inside of them and dreams were replaced by hormones and college prep courses and varsity sports while I continued to look for faeries in the woods behind my house.

Nostalgia is missing what might come back.

Dark came early and stayed full of lights and the shouts of children.

Life used to move much more quickly when I was a girl. We needed to abbreviate just to keep up.

Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare ourselves and our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed.

What Will Linger/Hollow of Him - They crept so quietly back. Mere hints of words, at first, then whispers in the loud echoing a winter past. In this place, hollow of Him, his poetry resounded. I could almost taste the fragments of the worlds he had discovered. I remember the ache in his words; you could see each syllable smoulder in his gaze.

For an instant I think I saw. I saw the loneliness of man as a gigantic wave which had been frozen in front of me, held back by the invisible wall of a metaphor.

What I want, more than anything, is to turn back time a little. To become the kid I used to be, who believed whatever my mother said was one hundred percent true and right without looking hard enough to see the hairline cracks.

We are homesick most for the places we have never known.

Something__e wondered later if it was simply his youth__omething that had weighed upon him until that moment broke off him, the way a piece of rock slides slowly into the sea and disappears in a spray of foam.

Graceful. Lean. Coordinated as she whirls, though how she knows what dancing is, [her grandfather] could never guess.The song plays on. He lets it go too long. The antenna is still up, probably dimly visible against the sky, the whole attic might as well shine like a beacon. But in the candlelight, in the sweet rush of a concerto, Marie-Laure bites her lower lip, and her face gives off a secondary glow, reminding him of the marshes beyond the town walls, in those winter dusks when the sun has set but isn't fully swallowed, and big patches of red pools of light burn - places he used to go with his brother, in what seems like lifetimes ago.

There was an irony and a paradox here: Franco thought of Pontito constantly, saw it in fantasy, depicted it, as infinitely desirable _ and yet he had a profound reluctance to return. But it is precisely such a paradox that lies at the heart of nostalgia _ for nostalgia is about a fantasy that never takes place, one that maintains itself by not being fulfilled. And yet such fantasies are not just idle daydreams or fancies; they press toward some fulfillment, but an indirect one - the fulfillment of art. These, at least, are the terms that D. Geahchan, the French psychoanalyst, has used. With reference in particular to the greatest of nostalgies, Proust, the psychoanalyst David Werman speaks of an 'aesthetic crystallization of nostalgia' - nostalgia raised to the level of art and myth.

It was a place where, if troubles did not vanish, they were made bearable.

These rotary dials were like meditation, they forced you to slow down and concentrate. If you polled the next number too soon, you had to start over from the top.

We__ all agreed that we__ outgrown jumping rope, but Shady had given me such a nice gift of a skipping rope, and when there__ nothing better to do, I guess you go back to what once felt good.

Everyone likes to reminisce, but not one wants to listen, and everyone feels annoyed when someone else tells a story.

There are no days more full than those we go back to.