T. S. Eliot Quotes

Every time I open the drawer, it's a trip down Memory Lane, which, if you don't turn off at the right exit, merges straight into the Masochistic Nostalgia Highway.

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more

The scene I had just witnessed (a couple making love in the ocean) brought back a lot of memories – not of things I had done but of things I had failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back. I envied Yeoman and felt sorry for myself at the same time, because I had seen him in a moment that made all my happiness seem dull.

Do we always grind through the present, doomed to throw a gold haze of fond retrospect over the past?

I don't have any regrets, really, except that one. I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.

They say that Hope is happiness But genuine Love must prize the past; And Mem'ry wakes the thoughts that bless: They rose first -- they set the last. And all that mem'ry loves the most Was once our only hope to be: And all that hope adored and lost Hath melted into memory. Alas! It is delusion all-- The future cheats us from afar: Nor can we be what we recall, Nor dare we think on what we are.

It becomes increasingly easy, as you get older, to drown in nostalgia.

Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.

... we chase after ghosts and spirits and are left holding only memories and dreams. It's not that we want what we can't have; it's that we've held all we could want and then had to watch it slip away.

...You can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back.

Strangely enough, this is the past that somebody in the future is longing to go back to.

. . .I really ought to have recognized it for what it was and, perhaps, to have stopped right there - for it was nostalgia, and what inspires nostalgia has been dead a long time

We all look for lost time.

There are many things that I feel I have missed out on.

Nostalgia is not what it used to be.

When you finally go back to your old home, you find it wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood.

There's no sustenance in the past.

I'm just fascinated by the past. You know, both by the possibilities it holds and by the complete tyranny of it, the way it sort of keeps you in this stranglehold and makes you want things that you no longer have and you can never get back.

I don't have a great nostalgia for the past.

It's defeatist to harp on what might have been, and yet, it's hard to resist considering what might have been.

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.

Nostalgia is not a place to live.

And all the trips you know you missed And all the lips you never kissed Cut through you like a knife. And now you see stretched out before thee Just another story of a life.

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

I used to dream about turning back time, about reclaiming the things I'd lost and the person I used to be.