Cultural Nostalgia Quotes

There won't be any more white folks around who think the 1950s were the good old days, because there won't be any more white folks around who actually remember them.

I feel very much at home in the early nineteenth century and am not inclined to leave it.

Weirdly, the past starts to be about something else. It becomes about style in a way that it wasn't about, and I don't mean writing style, but cultural style.

Every publisher or agent I've ever met told me the same thing - that Irish readers don't want to read about the bad old days of the Troubles; neither do the English and Americans - they only want to read about the Ireland of The Quiet Man, when red-haired widows are riding bicycles and everyone else is on a horse.

The beehives from the '60s were gorgeous. The big hair from the '80s wasn't.

Every ten years, we get a new old school. In 1987, we thought 1977 was the best era in hip-hop. Here we are in 2007, and we're discussing '97/'98, when 50 Cent just started.

I think the people who are sitting in their living room doing those, 'Let's take country music back' blogs and all that stuff, that's crazy to me. No one's saying that about rock & roll, and no one sounded like the Beatles since 1960. No one says that about R&B, and no one sounded like the Commodores since 1970.

A society that has made 'nostalgia' a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.

Part of me is probably more conservative than people realise. I like my old string quartets, I don't like music that's trippy for trippy's sake.

Really, each era has its own false nostalgia. We all put a picket fence up around something. For my generation it was the '50s, and for other generations it will be something else.

Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe.

Oh, God. The Sixties are coming back. Well I've got a 12-gauge double-barreled duck gun chambered for three-inch Magnum shells. And - speaking strictly for this retired hippie and former pinko beatnik - if the Sixties head my way, they won't get past the porch steps. They will be history. Which, for chrissakes, is what they're supposed to be.

At every point I wished that I was born English. They need to make it colder in here. You could hang meat in this room. But, yeah...I grew up in a very English household. My folks were from Liverpool. I've said this before, but there is nothing more English than an Englishman that no longer lives in England.

I feel like I have an affiliation with the '90s. I feel like a lot of things going on in fashion and pop culture were loud and outlandish.

Indeed, this is an important characteristic of the globalization debate: the tendency toward glorifying all things indigenous even when they deserve to be left in the past.

The school was nothing but reminiscence - of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia about somebody else's past.

As long as there are Japanese tourists, there will be a market for the Old South.

My mother left Hungary as a refugee, and she is not nostalgic for the life that she had back in Hungary, and yet Cubans certainly want the economic opportunity in the United States, but they're desperately homesick for the culture that they left behind.

It's a strange one - I've been away for 20 years now; I've been away longer than I lived in Canada, but for some reason I remain wholly Canadian.

Romantic music really stirs my soul. And, of course, I love Chinese music; it makes me feel closer to home.

I don't think that you can rehash music that was born in the Fillmore East and came from a whole different set of social and emotional circumstances. The situation has changed. Let's get real about this.

I don't get all this Speedo stuff actually, I mean, whatever happened to the feather boa?

When a scholar of the old culture vows no longer to have anything to do with men who believe in progress, he is right. For the old culture has its greatness and goodness behind it, and an historical education forces one to admit that it can never again be fresh.

I think people are always nostalgic for a time about 20 years before they were born.

To my mind, there is no doubt that this Gandhi age is the dark age of India. It is an age in which people, instead of looking for their ideals in the future, are returning to antiquity.