nostalgia

He knew very well that his memory detested him, that it did nothing but slander him; therefore he tried not to believe it and to be more lenient toward his own life. But that didn't help: he took no pleasure in looking back, and he did it as seldom as possible.

I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.

We are so afraid of being pulled under the water with the anchor. Scared of letting these memories swirl around our mind as they should. As tragic as it might feel, it__ evident that the sea we are drowning in is the same sea we were born into.

[__hat is the most real thing you can think of?__Jacques thought for a long time before answering; he tried to weigh up what was most vital and enduring in all that he had known. Eventually, no longer smiling, he said, __emory_.

A person in her twenties has been a child for most of her life, but as time goes by that portion that is childhood becomes smaller and smaller, more and more distant, more and more faded, though they say at the end of life the beginning returns with renewed vividness, as though you had sailed all the way around the world and were going back into the darkness from which you came.

In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.

As we age we begin to grasp at youthful bliss like a life raft in a sea of harsh reality.

For sailors who love the wind, memory is a good port of departure.

Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.

She knew with suddeness and ease that this moment would be with her always, within hand's reach of memory.She doubted if they all sensed it - they had seen the world - but even George was silent for a minute as they looked, and the scene, the smell, even the sound of the band playing a faintly recognisable movie theme, was locked forever in her, and she was at peace.

And so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.

She could sense it very clearly: for me, no less than for her, the past counted far more than the present, remembering something far more than possessing it. Compared to memory, every possession can only ever seem disappointing, banal, inadequate ... She understood me so well! My anxiety that the present 'immediately' turned into the past so that I could love it and dream about it at leisure was just like hers, was identical. It was 'our' vice, this: to go forwards with our heads forever turned back.

What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

I'd trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday.

It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures.

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

Memory believes before knowing remembers.[Light in August]

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.