Carolyn Gold Heilbrun Quotes

Nostalgia is a way of remembering people and places and things, and wishing things hadn't changed. It has a sweetness to it. Sadness is just--well--being sad.

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.

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

Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past.

Everybody that went away suffered a broken heart. "I'm coming back some day," they all wrote. But never did. The old life was too small to fit anymore.

Nostalgia, the vice of the aged.

I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.

Memory is not what the heart desires.

Tell me what we had was real, I whisper.

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.

I think you can only be nostalgic for something you've lost.

Sometimes nostalgia is a cage.

We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one's life?

Memories have to be our most painful blessing.

He was jealous of her future, and she of his past.

Well, anyway, her death changed our lives for the better, because it brought a kind of awareness, a specific sense of purpose and appreciation we hadn't had before. Would I trade that in order to have her back? In a fraction of a millisecond. But I won't ever have her back. So I have taken this, as her great gift to us. But. Do I block her out? Never. Do I think of her? Always. In some part of my brain, I think of her every single moment of every single day.

I would trade all my tomorrow's for one single yesterday.

If only' repeated again and again in her head like a battering ram...'if only' could break your heart.

Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.

I missed you even when I was with you. That’s been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.

I wish I knew. It might make me miss him more clearly. It might have made sad sense.

What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.

I love you more than songs can say, but I can't keep running after yesterday.

When a man or woman loves to brood over a sorrow and takes care to keep it green in their memory, you may be sure it is no longer a pain to them.

Okay I'll be honest girl I can't lie I miss you.