c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Your truth isn't everybody else's truth.
— Miranda Kenneally, Things I Can't Forget
We don’t see the truth because we are blind. What blinds us are all those false beliefs we have in our mind. We have the need to be right and to make others wrong. We trust what we believe, and our beliefs set us up for suffering.
— Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom
F-A-I-T-H The Fundamental Authority of Irrefutable Truth that assures confident Hope
— Pamela Christian
A primary reason that people believe that life is getting worse is because our information about the problems of the world has steadily improved. If there is a battle today somewhere on the planet, we experience it almost as if we were there. DuringWorld War II, tens of thousands of people might perish in a battle, and if the public could see it at all it was in a grainy newsreel in a movie theater weeks later. During World War I a small elite could read about the progress of the conflict in the newspaper(without pictures). During the nineteenth century there was almost no access to news in a timely fashion for anyone.
— Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed
There is no boundary between heaven and earth unless we believe in one.
— Leland Dirks, Seven Dogs in Heaven
One of the greatest tragedies I can think of is for a person to die having never fully questioned the life he was born into.
— Dan Pearce, Single Dad Laughing
When you take the time to really know yourself—know your values, know your beliefs, know what is important to you—you can make the right choice, even when it’s hard.We all have choices. We can choose our direction, every single day.
— Suraj Dahal
They are not insincere when they say that they believe these things. They do believe them, as people believe what they have always heard lauded and never discussed. But in the sense of that living belief which regulates conduct, they believe these doctrines just up to the point to which it is usual to act upon them.
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
The witch is a dangerous person. Neither his appearance nor his behaviour betray his satanic nature. He does not wear special clothing, he does not have magical instruments. He does not boil potions, does not prepare poisons, does not fall into a trance, and does not perform incantations. He acts by means of the psychic power he was born. Malefaction is a congenital trait of his personality. The fact that he does evil and brings misfortune owes nothing to his predilections. It brings him not special pleasure. He simply is that way.
— Ryszard Kapuściński
I am no Patriot for I try to breathe in with the steadfast belief that my country is the Earth and my religion is Humanism.
— K. Hari Kumar
If they told us what to believe, and we didn't come to it on our own, is it still true?
— Veronica Roth, Allegiant
Beliefs are conclusions reached by men who are lazy to think for themselves.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
New Rule: If an Evangelical tries to use Halloween to pimp Jesus to kids, they get to egg his house. On Halloween, the president of the American Family Association urged his flock to hand out a Christian-based comic book instead of candy. Excuse me, Halloween isn't a time to push your beliefs. You don't see me handing out pot to kids...Okay, well not the little kids.
— Bill Maher, The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass
These days, though, tolerance means that you accept the other person's views as being true or legitimate. If you claim that someone is wrong, you can get accused of being intolerant--even though, ironically, the person making the charge of intolerance isn't being accepting of your beliefs.
— Paul Copan
Kuan Yin Speaks on Reincarnation: “Beliefs are so powerful that they can create expansive or entrapping lifetimes over and over…Another life offers another opportunity, a chance to switch flavors so to speak. Taking oneself too personally, however, can cause a soul to get caught up, stuck in redundancy: in a particular (and perhaps unfortunate) flavor. In such instances, the individual is forgetting one has the ability to choose from a variety of flavors, lives!
— Hope Bradford, Oracle of Compassion: The Living Word of Kuan Yin
Death or Samadhi, man's life leads only to the grave. Appreciate your life.
— Usha Cosmico
Though man needs to live to believe, he does not need to believe to live.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In response to my father-in-law's view, I offered no opinion. He was not looking for my opinion. He had merely been spouting his belief, a conviction that would remain unchanged for all eternity.
— Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
I should like to preface my remarks with a personal statement in order that my later remarks will not be misunderstood. I consider myself an atheist.
— Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar
When will you understand that your childish beliefs mean an absolute nothing in this wild universe! When will you be serious? When will you give up deceiving yourself? When will you stop believing in the tales of old times as if they are true?
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Update your belief! If necessary, throw it to the bin! Don’t exaggerate your belief! Remember that your belief is not that much important; the important thing is what the science, what the reason and the truth say! And remember also that with the earthquake of knowledge many beliefs have collapsed and again many more will collapse!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
If it feels as though life is screwing with you - it isn't. The world isn't 'against you'.It's simply showing you what you believe and giving you a chance to observe it and change it.
— Dana Gore
A person tends to believe whatever is repeated over and over, whether it is true or not.
— Nikki Sex, Carmen's New York Romance Trilogy
In thinking about miracles, I believe that our frame of reference has been too dramatic. We have been looking for the burning bush, the parting of the sea, the bellowing voice from heaven. Instead we should be looking at the ordinary day-to-day events in our lives for evidence of the miraculous, maintaining at the same time a scientific orientation.
— M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
A hungry dog believes in nothing but meat.
— Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
...in a brutal country like ours where human life is cheap, it's stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs, high ideals--only people living in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.' 'Actually, it's the other way round. In a poor country the only consolation people can have is the one that comes from their beliefs.
— Orhan Pamuk, Snow
... science demands a terrible price - that we accept what experiments tell us about the universe, whether we like it or not.
— David Brin, Existence
A person could resist popular belief and stand up for personal principles, and though there may be consequences, not everything would necessarily be lost. In fact, something important might be gained, if only within oneself.
— Jean M. Auel, The Mammoth Hunters
It is the socially determined norms and traditions of gender roles, which must be challenged, and challenged with vigor. In nearly all countries, including America, the truth is that women have a low social status, and are considered inferior.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
Milena found Cilia outside, holding her bamboo box. Milena hugged her. ‘I’m sorry about your shins,’ she said. Milena lifted the lid of the box, and saw it, the precious paper, ruled in staves. People were generous. Milena had never believed that.
— Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden
Most man can think no better than a child! This fact perfectly explains why there are so many funny beliefs!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
In every opportunity, question your beliefs. Don’t forget that most of the beliefs are preposterous empty stories!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Jesus Hollywood believed in a lot of things. He believed that stars were ghosts of family long since past and that he was more likely to die from an asteroid falling from the sky than another human being getting the better of him. He believed that children could see things when adults had already stopped believing.Jesus Hollywood believed that you wrote your own story. He believed that anything could happen if you really set your mind to it. He believed that, in the end, everything would be ok; if it wasn't ok, it wasn't the end.Jesus Hollywood believed that it wasn't really Jesus that raised Lazarus from the dead, but the other way around.And Jesus Hollywood sure as fuck believed in love.
— Shannon Noelle Long, Second Coming
We only give credence to that which we can prove exists. Since we cannot find evidence that gods, miracles, and other supernatural things are real, we do not trouble ourselves about them. If that were to change, if Helzvog were to reveal himself to us, then we would accept the new information and revise our position.""It seems a cold world without something . . . more.""On the contrary," said Oromis, "it is a better world. A place where we are responsible for our own actions, where we can be kind to one another because we want to and because it is the right thing to do, instead of being frightened into behaving by the threat of divine punishment. I won't tell you what to believe, Eragon. It is far better to be taught to think critically and then be allowed to make your own decisions than to have someone else's notions thrust upon you. You asked after our religion, and I have answered you true. Make of it what you will.
— Christopher Paolini, Eldest
I have always found the hardest mind to change is one that is religious.
— Shannon L. Alder
Since art is a virtue of the intellect, it demands to communicate with the entire universe of the intellect. Hence it is that the normal climate of art is intelligence and knowledge: its normal soil, the civilized heritage of a consistent and integrated system of beliefs and values; its normal horizon , the infinity of human experience enlighted by the passionate insight of anguish or the intellectual virtues of a contemplative mind.
— Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry
An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that explains chaotic events and collective misfortunes in a way that flatters the virtue and competence of believers, while being vague or conspiratorial enough to withstand skeptical scrutiny.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out. I do not believe that, on the balance, religious belief has been a force for good. Although I am prepared to admit that in certain times and places it has had some good effects, I regard it as belonging to the infancy of human reason, and to a stage of development which we are now outgrowing.
— Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
To think because you have been “saved” that you are now sane is insanity. God doesn’t fix the mind. He only gives you opportunities to have moments of clarity. It is your job to climb the mountain and see above the clouds for yourself, not to believe the congregation's interpretation of the view.
— Shannon L. Alder
It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. It is clear also that thought is not free if all the arguments on one side of a controversy are perpetually presented as attractively as possible, while the arguments on the other side can only be discovered by diligent search.
— Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
People believe in God because they don't have any other explanation for things that happen.
— Jodi Picoult, Keeping Faith
My belief is the belief of no beliefs. That's my belief.
— T. Scott McLeod
The beliefs of your country mostly become your own beliefs! Not the reason but the empty tales shape you!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
As Christians it is not just for us to know what we believe, but why we believe it".~R. Alan Woods [2012]
— R. Alan Woods, The Journey Is The Destination: A Photo Journal
It is my belief that love dies from overuse, and the heart dies from a lack of interest in life without it.
— Abigail Brown
If you want to know what your true beliefs are- take a look at your actions.
— Robert Anthony
They are moved less by the direct presence of their gods than by the more indirect feeling that they would somehow like their gods to be present.
— Daniel L. Pals, Eight Theories of Religion
We each have our own beliefs. What is important is not to piush your beliefs onto others.
— Samina Ali
The past is a candle at great distance: too close to let you quit, too far to comfort you.
— Amy Bloom, Away
There is no greater sorrowThan to recall a happy timeWhen miserable.
— Dante Alighieri
We are homesick most for the places we have never known.
— Carson McCullers
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
How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more
— Milan Kundera, Identity
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, The Coast of Chicago: Stories
It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back.
— Sue Monk Kidd, Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story
One is always at home in one's past...
— Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
The past is for learning from and letting go. You can't revisit it. It vanishes.
— Adele Parks, Young Wives' Tales
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 Castañeda, Journey to Ixtlan
Each night I lie down in a graveyard of memories.
— Jerry Spinelli, Love, Stargirl
I'm your phantom dance partner. I'm your shadow. I'm not anything more.
— Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today. I don't think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great. If you're hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time.
— Art Buchwald
...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, Ten Little Indians
We were nostalgic for a time that wasn't yet over.
— Nina LaCour, We Are Okay
Moments never stay, whether or not you ask them, they do not care, no moment cares, and the ones you wish could stretch out like a hammock for you to lie in, well, those moments leave the quickest and take everything good with them, little burglars, those moments, those hours, those days you loved the most.
— Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing
Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.
— Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy
Have you ever wondered how nostalgia isn"t what it used to be?
— Jasper Fforde, First Among Sequels
There are no days more full than those we go back to.
— Colum McCann, Zoli
I love how summer just wraps it’s arms around you like a warm blanket.
— Kellie Elmore
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
Life used to move much more quickly when I was a girl. We needed to abbreviate just to keep up.
— Gabrielle Zevin, All These Things I've Done
The best times we’ve had on earth are usually with those we love.
— Van Harden, Life in the Purple Wedge!
The abbreviated exam week meant that Wednesday was the last day of school for us. And all day long, it was hard not to walk around, thinking about the lastness of it all.
— John Green, Paper Towns
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, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag
Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.
— Emil M. Cioran
You can't return to a place that no longer exists, luv.
— Samantha Sotto, Before Ever After
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
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, Missin' (Novel)
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, N.P
I had been there before
—  I knew all about it.
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, Abarat
When I was a kid, they had a saying, 'to err is human but to really fuck it up takes a computer.’ 
— Benjamin R.  Smith, Atlas
…nostalgia is, by definition, the least authentic of all feelings.
— Enrique de Hériz, Lies
We long to have again the vanished past, in spite of all its pain.
— Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus
Dark came early and stayed full of lights and the shouts of children.
— China Miéville, Kraken
He decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.
— Thomas Pynchon, V.
No matter how fierce was the passion that gripped him, the fact is he was paralyzed, transfixed by the contemplation of his own past. Only something so momentous as to drive from his consciousness all thoughts of before and after could have propelled him forward. And with his eyes fixed on the past, he had no choice but to continue along its trajectory.
— Sōseki Natsume, Kokoro
Anyway, those things would not have lasted long.The experience of the years shows it to me.But Destiny arrived in some haste and stopped them.The beautiful life was brief.But how potent were the perfumes,On how splendid a bed we lay,To what sensual delight we gave our bodies.An echo of the days of pleasure,An echo of the days drew near me,A little of the fire of the youth of both of us,Again I took in my hands a letter,And I read and reread till the light was gone.And melancholy, I came out on the balconyCame out to change my thoughts at least by looking atA little of the city that I loved,A little movement on the street and in the 
— Constantinos P. Cavafis
The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else's nostalgia
— Pete Hamill, Tabloid City
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, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
You may say, But wasn't this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.
— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
And perhaps we have reason to be very grateful that, both as children and long afterwards, we are never allowed to guess how the absorbing pursuit of the moment will appear, not only to others, but to ourselves, a very short time hence.
— Kenneth Grahame, The Golden Age
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
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
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, The Wailing: A National Black Oral History
...underneath that I'd said something else: we were both a couple of asswipes, and now only I'm an asswipe; why? And underneath that, something else: once an asswipe, always an asswipe.
— Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
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, The Prince of Tides
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, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past
The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.
— Sherwood Anderson, Poor White
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, Raw Pain Max
Nostalgic memory is a sudden encounter with the thingness of the thing that has been forgotten, not the continuous desire for possessions, whether past, present, or future.
— Marjorie Garber
The Pond"August of another summer, and once again I am drinking the sunand the lilies again are spread across the water. I know now what they want is to touch each other. I have not been here for many yearsduring which time I kept living my life. Like the heron, who can only croak, who wishes he  could sing, I wish I could sing. A little thanks from every throat would be appropriate. This is how it has been, and this is how it is: All my life I have been able to feel happiness, except whatever was not happiness, which I also remember. Each of us wears a shadow. But just now it is summer againand I am watching the lilies bow to each other, then slide on the wind and the tug of desire, close, close to one another, Soon now, I'll turn and start for home. And who knows, maybe I'll be singing.
— Mary Oliver, Felicity
Now and then I see a balloon caught in the power lines, holding on, waving, flapping softly in the evening air, and I wonder if somebody in some faraway city tried to send it to heaven the way my mother and I used to do.
— Kenny Porpora, The Autumn Balloon
The idea that she would leave all of this - the rooms of the house once more familiar and warm and comforting - and go back to Brooklyn and not return for a long time again frightened her now. She knew as she sat on the edge of the bed and took her shoes off and then lay back with her arms behind her head that she had spent every day putting off all thought of her departure and what she would meet on her arrival.
— Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn
It's a peculiar kind of dissatisfaction, a bittersweet nostalgia for a moment not yet past.
— Christina Baker Kline, A Piece of the World
And the further they go, the more they'll remember, they can take it from me.
— Rohinton Mistry, Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag
People I had never seen before flocked in, their faces showing a longing you never saw for cake. People's eyes lit up for a cupcake, cake seemed to signal celebration. But their eyes got filmy, watery, misty when we handed them a slice of pie. Pie was memory. Nostalgia. Pie made people recall simpler, maybe happier times.
— Judith Fertig, The Memory of Lemon
If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: "The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency.
— Milan Kundera, Ignorance
I think it's my memory of this period that makes me fantasise about living in the country. In reality I know there would be no shops and I would kill myself.
— Frankie Boyle, My Shit Life So Far
Nostalgia is missing what might come back.
— Will Advise
Nostalgia. It haunts us, it destroys us, and sometimes, its sentimentality consumes us piece by piece so that we may realize our once-familiar circumstance may never again return. It is a state of mind best indulged infrequently.
— Bryant A. Loney, Take Me to the Cat
However, I suppose VH1 *is* selling me something; they're selling nostalgia, which means they're selling my own memories back to me, which means they're selling me to me.
— Chuck Klosterman, Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas
I missed you more now than I had when I lost you. I was forgetting the bad things faster than I forgot the good, and the changing ratio felt a little bit like falling in love even though I was actually speaking to you less and less.
— Alexandra Kleeman, Intimations: Stories
The hours were long, but the days were short, and as much as I willed it to never come, the end of summer arrived anyway.
— Chelsey Philpot, Even in Paradise
I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It's full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being 'objective.' Nostalgia for what? I don't know. Because I'd rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the 'Anna' of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Allie sighed. It was an old yellow sound, like turning pages.
— Stephen King, The Gunslinger
...I have to admit that I've ... always felt burdened by nostalgia, by a desire to stop time, to recapture things that have been lost. A sense that everything, absolutely everything, is on a journey from which there's no return.
— Natalia Sanmartín Fenollera, The Awakening of Miss Prim
I want each day to last forever . . . It's a peculiar kind of dissatisfaction, a bittersweet nostalgia for a moment not yet past. Even in the midst of a pleasurable outing I'm aware of how ephemeral it is.
— Christina Baker Kline, A Piece of the World
Do you know why they call me the Count? Because I love to count! Ah-ha
— Richard Bachman, The Long Walk
Maybe that's just what nostalgia is: a willingness to embrace the pain of the past.
— Sarah Domet, The Guineveres
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.
— Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales
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.
— Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
I have a habit of being an archaeologist of my own past, a sentimental collector of personal artefacts which may at first glance appear random, but each of which holds a unique significance. As the years pass me by, I find that the number of objects within my possession begins to accumulate. A torn map. A sealed letter. A boat full of paper animals. Each item encapsulates within itself a story, akin to an outward manifestation of my inner journey.
— Agnes Chew, The Desire for Elsewhere
I miss the thrill of your self-destructive heart that melts in the sun like chocolate, bittersweet and incandescent.
— Maria Elena, Eternal Youth
I miss it like an ex-con misses the other inmates.
— Megan Miranda, All the Missing Girls
If there ever were one moment where everything worked for us, where we lived in harmony and at ease with our natures, then we would still be there. There is no garden to return to, no idyllic perfect childhood, no enwombed state. The Garden of Eden was boring, childhood is a nightmare we should all be grateful to be done with, and your mother smoked while she was pregnant and poisoned you in the womb with artificial sugar substitutes. The best thing any of us can do is just to keep fucking up in a forward motion, and see what comes out of it.
— Jessa Crispin, The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries
Saudade.A nostalgic longing to be near again to something or someone that is distant, or that has been loved and then lost; "the love that remains".
— Anonymous
Before VCRs, people used to decorate the tops of their TVs with family photos.
— Marshall Thornton, Lucky Days
Farewell, Timothy Riley’s Bar," Lane said softly. "Home of the nickel beer. Snooker emporium. Repository of Bluebird records, three for a dime. We honor you and your passing. Farewell. Farewell, Timothy Riley—and terraplanes and rumbleseats and saddle shoes and Helen Forrest and the Triple-C camps and Andy Hardy and Lum ‘n’ Abner and the world-champion New York Yankees! Rest in peace, you age of innocence—you beautiful, serene, carefree, pre-Pearl Harbor, long summer night. We’ll never see your likes again.
— Rod Serling, Rod Serling's Night Gallery
I love the way he smelled whenever his head dipped close to hear what I was saying—like the sun striking th cheek of a tomato, or soap drying in the hood of a car. I loved the way his hand felt on my spine. I loved.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
My dear, you never will understand time, will you? You're always trying to be the things you were, instead of the person you are tonight. Why do you save those ticket stubs and theater programs? They'll only hurt you later. Throw them away, my dear.
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
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.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
I'm nostalgic for a better tomorrow.
— Brian Spellman
... nostalgia was once thought to be a mental illness or a physical affliction; for me, it was both.
— Laura McHugh, Arrowood
He tilted the box toward a chipped Pottery Barn blue bowl, and the little blue clumps, like cerulean rat turds, tumbled out, hitting the porcelain with a surprisingly metallic thud. It sounded like pennies dumped into an aluminum trash can.
— Eric Spitznagel, Old Records Never Die: One Man's Quest for His Vinyl and His Past
I am old enough to enjoy a bit of nostalgia, but wise enough to know that there haven't been any "good ol' days" since Eden (the garden, not the prime minister).
— Ron Brackin
So are we going to eat some Boo Berry or what?" John said, leaping out of his seat and toward the refrigerator.
— Eric Spitznagel, Old Records Never Die: One Man's Quest for His Vinyl and His Past
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.
— Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
He pressed the herb to his nose. Thyme. He loved the name and he loved the smell. He looked out the window at the illusion of deep woods. His face too was out there, hung on a tree and returning his gaze. He drew close to the glass to lose the mirror effect. Outside, the forest panted its beefy halitus; the soil held the breaths of gloom in its dampness. Fifteen thousand years ago a glacier had sliced through this park he was living in, bringing with it the nutrients from all its travels. Fifteen thousand years ago human beings were the fable that frightened the dark woods.
— Nancy Zafris, The Home Jar: Stories
When shall I cease to regret you! – When learn to feel a home elsewhere! – Oh! Happy house, could you know what I suffer in now viewing you from this spot, from whence perhaps I may view you no more! – And you, ye well-known trees! – but you will continue the same. – No leaf will decay because we are removed, nor any branch become motionless although we can observe you no longer! – No; you will continue the same; unconscious of the pleasure or the regret you occasion, and insensible of any change in those who walk under your shade! – But who will remain to enjoy you?
— Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
All you will have is the present. Waste no energy crying over yesterday or dreaming of tomorrow. Nostalgia is fatiguing and destructive, it is the vice of the expatriate. You must put down roots as if they were forever, you must have a sense of permanence.
— Isabel Allende, Of Love and Shadows
The problem with nostalgia is what we tend to do is only remember what you like and you forget the parts you didn't like,
— John Edwards
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.
— Rainbow Rowell, Landline
an old villa surrounded by a garden looked to them like the image of a comforting home, the dream of an idyll long past.
— Milan Kundera, Ignorance
I roam the streets, silent and still,I look for You, in each and everything.I have come a long way from myself,so away,so long, that I,myself have become a memory.And so i seek Your gaze, to See myself,But what am i ? without Your touch ?How distant You are, yet How close Iam,this place holds a fortune, for my lost self.
— Syed Murtaza Haroon
Until then her view of time was the present moving forward and devouring the future; she either feared its swiftness (when she was awaiting something difficult) or rebelled at its slowness (when she was awaiting something fine). Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past. She sees a young man disconnecting himself from her life and going away, forevermore out of her reach. Mesmerized, all she can do is watch this piece of her life move off; all she can do is watch it and suffer. She is experiencing a brand-new feeling called nostalgia.
— Milan Kundera, Ignorance
It was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France.
— Milan Kundera, Ignorance
Something—he wondered later if it was simply his youth—something 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.
— Patrick Modiano, Une jeunesse
Most of the days, I am gripped by these visions,Memories! that haunt my present,What is it, That Separates me from You ?What is it, That can bring me close ?All through the night, i seek such things,All through the night, i lose Myself .
— Syed Murtaza Haroon
I understand, Bill. Because I tell myself a lot of stories to help me sleep at night. Stories about how Babe was my dearest friend, and I never betrayed her. Stories about how you and I had a great love, not just an occasional roll in the hay whenever she was out of town. Stories about how wonderful life was back then, when none of us told each other the truth, but so what? It was all so beautiful, wasn’t it? It was all so lovely and gracious. Not like it is now.
— Melanie Benjamin, The Swans of Fifth Avenue
And so it is inevitable that the day has come when we write about privacy with such nostalgia, analysing it as we would some unearthed fossil of a creature our human eyes had never fallen on.
— Aysha Taryam
His persistent nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldn't stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in florescents, were gone. Everyone had been so much more entertaining then. What had happened?
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
Nostalgia-- that's the basic sickness, and I never heard of a doctor who can cure it.
— Tim O'Brien
I began a lifelong affair with nostalgia, with only the vaguest notions of what I was nostalgic for.
— Lucy Grealy
The Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, the walls surrounding a medieval castle: obsolete walls evoke nostalgia. Make your walls obsolete.
— Khang Kijarro Nguyen
I have never forgotten, and I can't imagine you have, and I've thought of it over the years. It was so good, when it was good, I kept thinking. How could it go wrong?
— George R.R. Martin, Dying of the Light
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.
— Brian James, Life is But a Dream
It was a place where, if troubles did not vanish, they were made bearable.
— Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman
Everyone likes to reminisce, but not one wants to listen, and everyone feels annoyed when someone else tells a story.
— Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem
Speed is simply the rite that initiates us intoemptiness: a nostalgic desire for forms to revert to immobility, concealed beneath the very intensification of their mobility. Akin to the nostalgia for living forms that haunts geometry.
— Jean Baudrillard, America
We’d all agreed that we’d outgrown jumping rope, but Shady had given me such a nice gift of a skipping rope, and when there’s nothing better to do, I guess you go back to what once felt good.
— Clare Vanderpool
Mixed with the love we hold for our native country is the fact that it is the place where we were raised, and, should anything have gone a little wrong in this process, we will be reminded of this fault, by the scene of the crime, until the day we die.
— John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever
The old London was fading from her memory. She no longer expected to see the shops that had been bombed when she passed familiar streets. In many places the sites were being redeveloped. That’s what seemed real now – the new buildings and the flats above them. As she hit her stride, Mirabelle smiled. It felt good to be in the big city again and on her way.
— Sara Sheridan, Operation Goodwood
Isn't there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves?
— Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
I had intended to visit the haunting ground of my school days. Subconsciously I wanted to be in a place where anxiety, responsibility and financial burden had yet to surface.
— Joe Cawley
I would even argue that, for many displaced people, nostalgia is also blended with fear - the fear of uncertainty and of facing the challenges posed by the larger world and the fear of the absence of the clarity and confidence provided by the past. In essence, nostalgia is associated mostly with the experience of a particular type of migrants, namely, exiles.
— Ha Jin
For youth, the moon is a promise of all those tremendous things which await it, for older people a memento that the promise was never kept, a reminder of all that broke and went to pieces...And what is moonshine? Secondhand sunshine. Diluted, counterfeit.
— Hjalmar Söderberg, Doctor Glas
Divided - No tides of time or distance will wash away your step. It does not fleet as they do, those gladiators and their mighty spears or the beasts that howl into the dark for release. Our story carves deeper, pitilessly, infinitely. A wound that bleeds the ink that stained your palm and the tears of an impossible tomorrow.
— RJ Arkhipov
The head which does not turn backwards towards horizons that have vanished contains neither thought nor love.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
I didn't really want to come back here and again have to feel like my lungs were drowning in this perverse nostalgia.
— John Green, Paper Towns
For a long moment we didn't move. We just stared at each other. So much time had passed since our eyes last met. So much had changed. I turned away and pressed my head to the cold window pane. I traced my initials onto the misted glass and, as they began to fade, He reached out his fingers and retraced my signature. I watched it fade once more and felt his moist fingers brush against my lips. He let them linger there a moment, then replaced them with his own lips. Then I woke up.
— RJ Arkhipov
Washingtonians love the "So-and-so is spinning in his grave" cliché. Someone is always speculating about how some great dead American would be scandalized over some crime against How It Used to Be. The Founding Fathers are always spinning in their graves over something, as is Ronald Reagan, or FDR. Edward R. Murrow is a perennial grave spinner in the news business (though in fact, Murrow was cremated).
— Mark Leibovich, This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — plus plenty of valet parking! — in America’s Gilded Capital
The whiff of ocean on the southern breeze and the smell of burning asphalt brought back memories of summers past. It had seemed as though those sweet dreams of summer would last forever: the warmth of a girl’s skin, an old rock ‘n’ roll song, freshly washed button-down shirt, the odor of cigarette smoke in a pool changing room, a fleeting premonition. Then one summer (when had it been?) the dreams had vanished, never to return.
— Haruki Murakami
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.
— RJ Arkhipov
It is always the same. Whether you are walking or going by train, the way always seems shorter the second time than the first. (And that is true of distances that are not to be measured in miles and yards.)
— Erich Kästner
Wendy’s house, unlike many in Cape Breton, had three floors, along with a basement and attic. Aside from Wendy’s bedroom, there was a laundry room. The dirty water in the sink would rush from the washer hose, bubbling up, threatening to overflow, but it never did. Next-door was a motel with a neon sign that read in turquoise and pink, “We have the best rates in town!”, but the ‘E’ in ‘rates’ kept flickering on and off day and night so that every few seconds it would switch to, “We have the best rats in town!
— Rebecca McNutt, Smog City
Woman lost (skin deep) like a damn fine thread in the fireWoman of the world caught up in your black machinationsI was a woman who cried alone at night, who gave it all away when she saw the good heart of the man insideWoman caught standing up; her open parts are broken -Someone's armour broke right through, it was you, youFor some reason I've been thinking about you, your lightToday, you poured out all the tension, the ego undergroundHibernating inside my heart. I was so close to it, to the flicker Of love in a lonely street and I turned my head and walkedAway from the flame in your arms. As I put away the fun inA house of fight I came across you and a mechanism inMy brain shifted chemically, walls caved in like the cadenceIn your words and I was lost in the darkness. Even now inMiddle age I remember when desire was a popular drugAnd everyone was selling it but I don't live to explore to beAble to illuminate the proof of my existence, live to burnVicariously though the diamond mouth of sleeping stars.From so much love, pictures of death arrived in black andWhite photographs and you're perfect, you always were -Illusions have no flaws; they're dangerous beings, smoke.Could I take the moon back and still live with my greatExpectations of nostalgia, laughter, tears and suffering -But they are all a part of me not the people of the stars,Long dead videotape, the past has stained the symphonyOf my soul (like the wind through the trees) throughoutMe finding myself, my two left feet as a female poetThe warning was there of the noise of eternity, signs That said, don't anger the sea, you have an ally in her.When men grow cold listen to their stories and bask inThe glory of their genuine deaths, their winters, putThem away so you can read them like the newspaper.Once in a while you can go back to where you stoodIn youth with your afternoon tea, the sun of God in ourEyes - I am that kind of woman who lives in the past
— Abigail George, Feeding The Beasts
He smelled the odor of the pine boughs under him, the piney smell of the crushed needles and the sharper odor of the resinous sap from the cut limbs. ... This is the smell I love. This and fresh-cut clover, the crushed sage as you ride after cattle, wood-smoke and the burning leaves of autumn. That must be the odor of nostalgia, the smell of the smoke from the piles of raked leaves burning in the streets in the fall in Missoula. Which would you rather smell? Sweet grass the Indians used in their baskets? Smoked leather? The odor of the ground in the spring after rain? The smell of the sea as you walk through the gorse on a headland in Galicia? Or the wind from the land as you come in toward Cuba in the dark? That was the odor of cactus flowers, mimosa and the sea-grape shrubs. Or would you rather smell frying bacon in the morning when you are hungry? Or coffee in the morning? Or a Jonathan apple as you bit into it? Or a cider mill in the grinding, or bread fresh from the oven?
— Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
Pretty mountains, pretty river, bumpy but pleasant tar road... old buildings, old people on a front porch... strange how old, obsolete buildings and plants and mills, the technology of fifty and a hundred years ago, always seem to look so much better than the new stuff.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values