"I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled."
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale : A Novel)

"وطنك هو المكان الذى ارتديت فيه أول سروال طويل فى حياتك، ولعبت أول مباراة كرة قدم، وسمعت أول قصيدة، وكتبت أول خطاب حب، وتلقيت أول علقة من معلمك أو خصومك فى المدرسة.. وطنك هو المكان الذى ذهبت فيه للمسجد لأول مرة وحدك، وخلعت حذاءك متحديًا صديقك أن يقف جوارك لتريا أيكما أطول قامة.. وطنك هو أول مكان تمرّغت على عشبه فى صراع مع صديق لدود من أجل فتاة لا تعرف شيئا عن كليكما"
— أحمد خالد توفيق (ما وراء الطبيعة: 12 - أسطورة البيت)

"How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home."
— William Faulkner

"There is no greater sorrow
Than to recall a happy time
When miserable.

Nessun maggior dolore
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria.
- Inferno (V, 121),"
— Dante (Inferno (Modern Library Series) - translated by John Ciardi)

"His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless."
— Ernest Hemingway

"Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being."
— Albert Camus (The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt)

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins"
— T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land and Other Poems)

"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 (Streams of Silver)

"Listen to the MUSTN'TS, child,
Listen to the DON'TS
Listen to the SHOULDN'TS
The IMPOSSIBLES, the WON'TS
Listen to the NEVER HAVES.
Then listen close to me -
Anything can happen, child,
ANYTHING can be!!"
— Shel Silverstein

"And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"What was our life like? I almost don't remember now. Though I remember it, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly."
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"When people talk about the good old days, I say to people, 'It's not the days that are old, it's you that's old.' I hate the good old days. What is important is that today is good."
— Karl Lagerfeld

"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 (Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book)

"It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"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

"It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back."
— Sue Monk Kidd (Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story)

"There are a few moments in your life when you are truly and completely happy, and you remember to give thanks. Even as it happens you are nostalgic for the moment, you are tucking it away in your scrapbook."
— David Benioff (When the Nines Roll Over: And Other Stories)

"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

"…nostalgia is, by definition, the least authentic of all feelings."
— Enrique de Hériz (Lies)

"Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin."
— Listen With Mother Stories

"There are no days more full than those we go back to."
— Colum McCann (Zoli: A Novel)

"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

"The verbal patterns and the patterns of behavior we present to children in these lighthearted confections are likely to influence them for the rest of their lives. These aesthetic impressions, just like the moral teachings of early childhood, remain indelible."
— Esphyr Slobodkina

"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."
— Stephen King (Carrie)

"A part of my appreciation for the good which moments bring has come from awareness and recognition. But it has also come from a correspnding sadness which arises from their passing. When something that can never quite be reenacted comes to an end (and all moments are that way), I feel a pensiveness within. This pensiveness gives my life a quality that might be best described as bittersweet. And those moments take on double meaning and richness - because they are here now - and because they will not always be."
— Bob Benson

"We men of this age are rotten with book-lore and with a yearning for the past.
“The Last Generation”"
— James Elroy Flecker

"The sixties are like a theme park to them. They wear the costume, buy their tickets, and they have the experience."
— Douglas Coupland (Shampoo Planet)

"
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