Emotional Attachment to the Past Quotes

You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!

And, hungry for the old, familiar ways, I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.

I never went to high school reunions. My thing is, out of sight, out of mind. That's my attitude toward life. So I don't have any romanticism about any part of my past.

Nostalgia, the vice of the aged.

Nostalgia is a form of depression both for a society and an individual.

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 feel some unwillingness to quit the remembrance of the past. With all the hope of the new I feel that we are leaving the old.

I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.

We're afraid to move on, that's why there's so much nostalgia on the internet... 'cause we don't wanna look forward, that's scary.

...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.

Everyone can of course take their own meaning, that's the beauty of music and lyrics, but to me it seems like everything is about being attached to the past and being afraid of moving forward, afraid of that big dive or step and losing what was.

For me, nostalgia is an involuntary emotion. ... I think it's just a natural human response to loss.

Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.

I don't think nostalgia is a healthy modality. But nostalgia and a sense of history are not the same thing. Nostalgia is a dysfunction of the historical impulse, or a corruption of the historical impulse.

She lived in her past life — every letter seemed to recall some circumstance of it. How well she remembered them all! His looks and tones, his dress, what he said and how — these relics and remembrances of dead affection were all that were left her in the world.

Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we have never had, for the first involves knowledge and pleasure, the second only ignorance and pain.

Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.

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.

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.

Why doesn't the past decently bury itself, instead of sitting waiting to be admired by the present?

People could not get enough of what they had lost, even if they no longer wanted it.