45 Nostalgia Quotes To Reflect

In our fast-paced, constantly evolving world, the sweet tug of nostalgia offers a comforting escape, allowing us to pause and reflect on cherished moments from the past. Whether it's the scent of a childhood home, the melody of an old song, or the simplicity of bygone days, nostalgia wraps us in an embrace of warmth and familiarity. Our curated collection of the top 45 nostalgia quotes invites you to journey back in time, offering insights and reflections that resonate with your own memories and experiences. Join us as we delve into these poignant words, reminding us of the enduring impact of our past on the present.

1. “How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.” - William C. Faulkner

2. “There is no greater sorrowThan to recall a happy timeWhen miserable.” - Dante Alighieri

3. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” - T.S. Eliot

4. “The 'what should be' never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no 'what should be,' there is only what is.” - Lenny Bruce

5. “In every age "the good old days" were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them. ” - Brooks Atkinson

6. “Have you ever wondered how nostalgia isn"t what it used to be?” - Jasper Fforde

7. “…nostalgia is, by definition, the least authentic of all feelings.” - Enrique de Hériz

8. “Philosophy is really nostalgia, the desire to be at home.” - Novalis

9. “Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

10. “That's most interesting. But I was no more a mind-reader then than today. Iwas weeping for an altogether different reason. When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. Morescientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But aharsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could notremain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn't really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I've never forgotten.” - Kazuo Ishiguro

11. “It's not like I'm all into nostalgia and history, it's just that I can't stand the way things are now” - Novala Takemoto

12. “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.” - Carlos Castaneda

13. “It's one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed's drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can't go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you--they're not, don't flatter yourself, they couldn't care less--but because once you're in orbit and you return to Reed's drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha's Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.” - Walker Percy

14. “...And nostalgia is a cancer. Nostalgia will fill your heart up with tumors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what you are. You're just an old fart dying of terminal nostalgia.” - Sherman Alexie

15. “It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back.” - Sue Monk Kidd

16. “Theatres are curious places, magician's trick-boxes where the golden memories of dramtic triumphs linger like nostalgic ghosts, and where the unexplainable, the fantastic, the tragic, the comic and the absurd are routine occurences on and off the stage. Murders, mayhem, politcal intrigue, lucrative business, secret assignations, and of course, dinner.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

17. “Life used to move much more quickly when I was a girl. We needed to abbreviate just to keep up.” - Gabrielle Zevin

18. “Journey to the end of day, Come the fire-fly, Come the moon; Say a prayer for God's good grace And sleep with lore upon your face.” - Clive Barker

19. “Carefully squeezing through the forest of adults that crowded the aisles, feeling like an intruder in a forbidden temple, he cautiously pushed deeper into the newsstand and found a new paperback by a writer whose novel about vampires he had read and reread until the cover was falling apart. There had been an all-black cover on the vampire book. This new one gleamed like polished chrome. It was called THE SHINING, but it cost $2.50 and he had spent all but $1.25 of his weekly allowance on some STAR WARS stuff at the mall.” - C. Dean Andersson

20. “Haven't you noticed, too, on the part of nearly everyone you know, a growing rebellion against the present? And an increasing longing for the past? I have. Never before in all my long life have I heard so many people wish that they lived 'at the turn of the century,' or 'when life was simpler,' or 'worth living,' or 'when you could bring children into the world and count on the future,' or simply 'in the good old days.' People didn't talk that way when I was young! The present was a glorious time! But they talk that way now. For the first time in man's history, man is desperate to escape the present. Our newsstands are jammed with escape literature, the very name of which is significant. Entire magazines are devoted to fantastic stories of escape - to other times, past and future, to other worlds and planets - escape to anywhere but here and now. Even our larger magazines, book publishers and Hollywood are beginning to meet the rising demand for this kind of escape. Yes, there is a craving in the world like a thirst, a terrible mass pressure that you can almost feel, of millions of minds struggling against the barriers of time. I am utterly convinced that this terrible mass pressure of millions of minds is already, slightly but definitely, affecting time itself. In the moments when this happens - when the almost universal longing to escape is greatest - my incidents occur. Man is disturbing the clock of time, and I am afraid it will break. When it does, I leave to your imagination the last few hours of madness that will be left to us; all the countless moments that now make up our lives suddenly ripped apart and chaotically tangled in time.Well, I have lived most of my life; I can be robbed of only a few more years. But it seems too bad - this universal craving to escape what could be a rich, productive, happy world. We live on a planet well able to provide a decent life for every soul on it, which is all ninety-nine of a hundred human beings ask. Why in the world can't we have it? ("I'm Scared")” - Jack Finney

21. “En griego, «regreso» se dice nostos. Algos significa “sufrimiento”. La nostalgia es, pues, el sufrimiento causado por el deseo incumplido de regresar. La mayoría de los europeos puede emplear para esta noción fundamental una palabra de origen griego (nostalgia) y, además, otras palabras con raíces en la lengua nacional: en español decimos “añoranza”; en portugués, saudade. En cada lengua estas palabras poseen un matiz semántico distinto. Con frecuencia tan sólo significan la tristeza causada por la imposibilidad de regresar a la propia tierra. Morriña del terruño. Morriña del hogar. En inglés sería homesickness, o en alemán Heimweh, o en holandés heimwee. Pero es una reducción espacial de esa gran noción. El islandés, una de las lenguas europeas más antiguas, distingue claramente dos términos: söknudur: nostalgia en su sentido general; y heimfra: morriña del terruño. Los checos, al lado de la palabra “nostalgia” tomada del griego, tienen para la misma noción su propio sustantivo: stesk, y su propio verbo; una de las frases de amor checas más conmovedoras es styska se mi po tobe: “te añoro; ya no puedo soportar el dolor de tu ausencia”. En español, “añoranza” proviene del verbo “añorar”, que proviene a su vez del catalán enyorar, derivado del verbo latino ignorare (ignorar, no saber de algo). A la luz de esta etimología, la nostalgia se nos revela como el dolor de la ignorancia. Estás lejos, y no sé qué es de ti. Mi país queda lejos, y no sé qué ocurre en él. Algunas lenguas tienen alguna dificultad con la añoranza: los franceses sólo pueden expresarla mediante la palabra de origen griego (nostalgie) y no tienen verbo; pueden decir: je m?ennuie de toi (equivalente a «te echo de menos» o “en falta”), pero esta expresión es endeble, fría, en todo caso demasiado leve para un sentimiento tan grave. Los alemanes emplean pocas veces la palabra “nostalgia” en su forma griega y prefieren decir Sehnsucht: deseo de lo que está ausente; pero Sehnsucht puede aludir tanto a lo que fue como a lo que nunca ha sido (una nueva aventura), por lo que no implica necesariamente la idea de un nostos; para incluir en la Sehnsucht la obsesión del regreso, habría que añadir un complemento: Senhsucht nach der Vergangenheit, nach der verlorenen Kindheit, o nach der ersten Liebe (deseo del pasado, de la infancia perdida o del primer amor).” - Milan Kundera

22. “It partook ... of eternity ... there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.” - Virginia Woolf

23. “The nostalgia of a moment's love can be an illusionary precipice from which we fall from truth; in heartbreak, what we escape to in the past is what tortures us in the present.” - Mike Norton

24. “Kami baru pulang dari tanah kuburanyang menanam kampung kami.” - Suhaimi Haji Muhammad

25. “Hey presto: time travel. You don't need a time machine, it turns out, you just need a friend to laugh like a teenager. Chronology shivers.” - Michael Marshall Smith

26. “You can't return to a place that no longer exists, luv.” - Samantha Sotto

27. “And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that—except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it.” - Joan Didion

28. “Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance.” - Pat Conroy

29. “Eraritjaritjaka albutjikaNkinjaba iturala albutjika ...His heart is filled with longing to turn for homeIn the heat of the sun to return home ...'Ulamba chant, Aboriginal Central Australia” - Stuart Rintoul

30. “This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.” - Joyce Carol Oates

31. “I love how summer just wraps it’s arms around you like a warm blanket.” - Kellie Elmore

32. “Bernostalgia selalu terasa menyedihkan, walau di dalam kesedihan itu ada keindahan yang misterius.” - Fenny Wong

33. “In the Catskills, nostalgia runs backwards. The upwardly mobile Jewish masses of the 1950s and 1960s have been replaced by the Jews of 19th century Poland.” - Kevin Haworth

34. “Now that lilacs are in bloomShe has a bowl of lilacs in her roomAnd twists one in her fingers while she talks."Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not knowWhat life is, you who hold it in your hands"; (slowly twisting the lilac stalks)"You let it flow from you, you let it flow,And youth is cruel, and has no remorseAnd smiles at situations which it cannot see."I smile, of course,And go on drinking tea.” - T.S. Eliot

35. “Looking at the elementary schoolers in their colorful T-shirts from various day camps, Percy felt a twinge of sadness. He should be at Camp Half-Blood right now, settling into his cabin for the summer, teaching sword-fighting lessons in the arena, playing pranks on the other counselors. These kids had no idea just how crazy a summer camp could be.” - Rick Riordan

36. “1980's: not a time period but a state of mind.” - Carrie Vaughn

37. “In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.” - Joan Didion

38. “The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.” - Vladimir Nabokov

39. “NW" is full of split selves, people alienated from the very things they thought defined them. Their nostalgia -- for old movies, old songs, buses they don't ride anymore -- is less a salve than a form of pain.” - Christian Lorentzen

40. “Din splendorile cafelei de odineoară, neschimbat rămăsese doar mangalul.” - Naguib Mahfouz

41. “I am sick of old ghosts and I just want to feel safe again without the haunts of old vulnerabilities.” - Donna Lynn Hope

42. “Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?” - Haruki Murakami

43. “The age of recording is necessarily an age of nostalgia--when was the past so hauntingly accessible?--but its bitterest insight is the incapacity of even the most perfectly captured sound to restore the moment of its first inscribing. That world is no longer there.” - Geoffrey O'Brien

44. “Have you ever been homesick for someplace that doesn'tactually exist anymore? Someplace that exists only in yourmind?” - Jenny Lawson

45. “Above all, staring at my old bedroom ceiling, I feel safe. Cocooned from the world; wrapped up in cotton wool. No one can get me here. No one even knows I'm here. I won't get any nasty letters and I won't get any nasty phone calls and I won't get any nasty visitors. It's like a sanctuary. I feel as if I'm fifteen again, with nothing to worry about but my Homework. (And I haven't even got any of that.)” - Sophie Kinsella