Peter Matthiessen Quotes

We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

The Portuguese and Galician term 'saudade' suggests a profoundly bittersweet nostalgia.

Sharp nostalgia, infinite and terrible, for what I already possess.

I used to suffer from a lot of regret while touring. Regret at having to leave certain places, people and situations, or just a beautiful day.

Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past.

My days are gone a-wandering.

I miss the game - I miss it a lot.

I always say I was born too late in the world, too old.

I wish I had never left England

I think the premise of somebody trying to recreate a night from their teenage years stuck with me as something potentially very tragically comic.

The novel is like a melancholy form. It's about some kind of disillusionment with the way things are versus the idea of how they could be or how they used to be.

I've got to confess... I do feel slightly like I've been born in the wrong time.

Out my window.. I see everything I dream about and wished I had

I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.

Aberystwyth (n.) A nostalgic yearning which is in itself more pleasant than the thing being yearned for.

A feeling of sadness and longing, That is not akin to pain, And resembles sorrow only As the mist resembles the rain.

I stayed there loving you, though the love made me, not sad but I guess melancholy, for a reason I couldn’t point to.

Dear as remembered kisses after death, And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd On lips that are for others; deep as love, Deep as first love, and wild with all regret; O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.

It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back.

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.

I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.

We are homesick most for the places we have never known.

It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.

homesickness is just a state of mind for me. i'm always missing someone or someplace or something, i'm always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. my life has been one long longing.