Romanticized Past Quotes

I liked the America of Bing Crosby, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton - it was all a dream, of course, but a very alluring dream for a young man from Canton.

Dear, sweet, unforgettable childhood! Why does this irrevocable time, forever departed, seem brighter, more festive and richer than it actually was?

Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.

Everybody has a different idea of when those good old days were, but everyone is convinced that there was a time when literature really mattered and that it doesn't now. They also tend to believe that it really matters someplace else - in very improbable places often. Russia is someone's idea of a place where literature really counts.

I really think I'd have enjoyed the life of a Regency buck.

The Golden Age was never the present age.

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.

Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed.

Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed.

But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true - that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place...and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since.

There is nothing in England that exercises a more delightful spell over my imagination than the lingerings of the holiday customs and rural games of former times. They recall the pictures my fancy used to draw in the May morning of life, when as yet I only knew the world through books, and believed it to be all that poets had painted it; and they bring with them the flavour of those honest days of yore, in which, perhaps with equal fallacy, I am apt to think the world was more home-bred, social, and joyous than at present.

Those men, those of former times, had soul and eyes that in no way resemble ours, and in their veins, along with their blood, flowed something that has disappeared: love and admiration for the Beautiful.

The notion that somehow through a trade war or protectionism or magical thinking that we're going to return to a romanticized economic past is, in the end, going to be an illusion. And a severe disappointment to millions of decent, hard-working people.

First it was football, then basketball. I still think about going back to college and playing basketball. Another romantic thing was that I wanted to join the Army, but it was only because I loved the uniforms.

When you think back to your first kiss, your hair is perfect and she was wearing a cool outfit. We remember it with restraint and we remember it with style. We remember it as idealistically as you can think.

History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.

I'm an eighteenth-century girl at heart. I wouldn't mind being set down in London in 1715, in the midst of all the drama of the Hanoverian succession.

Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.

The scenes and events of long ago, and the persons who took part in them, wear a charming aspect to the eye of memory, which sees only the outlines and takes no note of disagreeable details. The present enjoys no such advantage, and so it always seems defective.

Those old credulities, to Nature dear, Shall they no longer bloom upon the stock Of history?

I suppose there were moonless nights and dark ones with but a silver shaving and pale stars in the sky, but I remember them all as flooded with the rich indolence of a full moon.