48 Nostalgia Quotes For Reflection

In our fast-paced world, there's something uniquely comforting about taking a moment to pause and reflect on the past. Nostalgia has a way of transporting us back to simpler times, evoking feelings of warmth, familiarity, and sometimes even a tinge of melancholy. Whether it’s memories of childhood adventures, cherished friendships, or love gone by, these snippets of the past can bring a sense of grounding and introspection. Our carefully curated collection of nostalgia quotes not only captures the essence of these treasured moments but also invites you to embark on your own journey of reflection. Join us as we explore these timeless words, each echoing the beauty and bittersweet nature of memories that have shaped us.

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

2. “Nostalgia is a necessary thing, I believe, and a way for all of us to find peace in that which we have accomplished, or even failed to accomplish. At the same time, if nostalgia precipitates actions to return to that fabled, rosy-painted time, particularly in one who believes his life to be a failure, then it is an empty thing, doomed to produce nothing but frustration and an even greater sense of failure.” - R.A. Salvatore

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

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

5. “The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.” - Milan Kundera

6. “Perhaps a creature of so much ingenuity and deep memory is almost bound to grow alienated from his world, his fellows, and the objects around him. He suffers from a nostalgia for which there is no remedy upon earth except as it is to be found in the enlightenment of the spirit--some ability to have a perceptive rather than an exploitive relationship with his fellow creatures.” - Loren Eiseley

7. “I wonder what it felt to move to a country where you didn't grow up. I had thought about that often since my sister got married. Do you become a character in a story native to that land, or do you, somewhere in your heart, want to return to your homeland.” - Banana Yoshimoto

8. “I felt a pang -- a strange and inexplicable pang that I had never felt before. It was homesickness. Now, even more than I had earlier when I'd first glimpsed it, I longed to be transported into that quiet little landscape, to walk up the path, to take a key from my pocket and open the cottage door, to sit down by the fireplace, to wrap my arms around myself, and to stay there forever and ever.” - Alan Bradley

9. “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

10. “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

11. “It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures.” - Ally Condie

12. “As we age we begin to grasp at youthful bliss like a life raft in a sea of harsh reality.” - Brad Herzog

13. “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.” - Giorgio Bassani

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

15. “Ten long trips around the sun since I last saw that smile, but only joy and thankfulness that on a tiny world in the vastness, for a couple of moments in the immensity of time, we were one.” - Ann Druyan

16. “Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imaginedfuture, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love ora passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convincedthat even the smallest particle of the surrounding world wascharged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, andone would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind-loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by thehigh, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, somany and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like firefliesin the perfumed heat of summer night.” - Mark Strand

17. “[T]he very color of the air in the place I was born was different, the smell of the earth was special, redolent with memories of my parents.” - Natsume Soseki

18. “Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia.” - Mary Schmich

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

20. “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

21. “Our plans for the future made us laugh and feel close, but those same plans somehow made anything more than temporary between us seem impossible. It was the first time I’d ever had the feeling of missing someone I was still with.” - Stuart Dybek

22. “Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way--and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

23. “Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world.” - Simon Reynolds

24. “PatriotismBreathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, 'This is my own, my native land!' Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd As home his footsteps he hath turn'dFrom wandering on a foreign strand? If such there breathe, go, mark him well; For him no Minstrel raptures swell; High though his titles, proud his name, Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;Despite those titles, power, and pelf, The wretch, concentred all in self, Living, shall forfeit fair renown, And, doubly dying, shall go down To the vile dust from whence he sprung,Unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung.” - Walter Scott

25. “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

26. “How can days and happenings and moments so good become so quickly ugly, and for no reason, for no real reason? Just—change. With nothing causing it.” - Philip K. Dick

27. “Things aren't what they used to be' is the rallying cry of small minds. When men say things used to be better, they invariably mean they were better for them, because they were young, and had all their hopes intact. The world is bound to look a darker place as you slide into the grave.” - Joe Abercrombie

28. “Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin. It is largely because of the books, films and reminiscences that have come between that the war of 1914-18 is now supposed to have had some tremendous, epic quality that the present one lacks.” - George Orwell

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

30. “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.” - Stefan Grabinski

31. “...and should I die in her care, I would leave smiling because, I will linger in the hills beside her...” - Kellie Elmore

32. “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

33. “Câţiva centimetri, câţiva ani, câteva mii de lei in plus, câteva cărţi citite în plus, mă rog, lucruri de felul ăsta despart oamenii...” - Mircea Cartarescu

34. “There's just something about the way he sings. It makes me think of when it snows outside, and the fire is warm, and Podo is telling us a story while you're cooking, and there's no place I'd rather be--but for some reason I still feel... homesick.” - Andrew Peterson

35. “Never look back; you may only find what you left or let you go.” - Stefanos Livos

36. “Schoolboy days are no happier than the days of afterlife, but we look back upon them regretfully because we have forgotten our punishments at school and how we grieved when our marbles were lost and our kites destroyed – because we have forgotten all the sorrows and privations of the canonized ethic and remember only its orchard robberies, its wooden-sword pageants, and its fishing holidays.” - Mark Twain

37. “Because that world's gone. The world where people walked around whistling that music. All the madrigal singers in the world can't make that other one real again. It's like dinosaurs. We can put them back together perfectly, bone for bone, but we don't know what they smelled like, what kind of sounds they made, or how big they really looked standing in the grass under all those fossil fern trees. Even the sunlight must have been different, and the wind. What can bones tell you about a kind of wind that doesn't blow anymore?” - Peter S. Beagle

38. “94 was a good year to be twelve. Star Wars still had two more years as Box Office King, cartoons were still hand-drawn, and the Disney "D" still looked like a backwards "G." Words like "Columbine," "Al Qaeda" and "Y2K" were not synonymous with "terror," and 9-1-1 was an emergency number instead of a date. At twelve years old, summer still mattered. Monarch caterpillars still crawled beneath every milkweed leaf. Dandelions (or "wishes" as Mara called them) were flowers instead of pests. And divorce was still considered a tragedy. Before Mara, carnivals didn't make me sick.” - Jake Vander Ark

39. “As to the past, I would not mind retrieving from various corners of space-time certain lost comforts, such as baggy trousers and long, deep bathtubs.” - Vladimir Nabokov

40. “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

41. “Strange, how the best moments of our lives we scarcely notice except in looking back.” - Joe Abercrombie

42. “I know what it feels like, and it sucks, it really does, when you are up in the middle of the night thinking about the things that you've suddenly became aware of. The things you're missing out on right now, and all the people who are not close to you anymore, and all of the good times that will never happen again, and all the people who have meant the world to you who have forgotten about you forever, and you get this awful feeling that's kind of like a mix between loneliness and nostalgia.” - abraham m. alghanem

43. “I'm not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they're going to do. I'm just going to do it. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.” - John Green

44. “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

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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it.” - Shannon L. Alder