"Nostalgia" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... PORTRAIT by Emery Pottle (The Touchstone). This study in Italian backgrounds is by another disciple of Henry James, who portrays with deft sure touches the nostalgia of an American girl unhappily married to an Italian nobleman. It just fails of complete persuasiveness because it is a trifle overstrung, but nevertheless it is memorable for its ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... that nostalgia is a modern weakness, or the monopoly of human minds. When Finn looked out across the moonlit Downs that night, while strolling round the house with the Master before going to bed, nostalgia filled his heart to aching-point and clouded his mind with its elusive, tormenting vapors ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... Chopin is the god who creates them." In this etude Kleczynski thinks there are traces of weariness of life, and quotes Orlowski, Chopin's friend," He is only afflicted with homesickness." Willeby calls this study the most beautiful of them all. For me it is both morbid and elegiac. There is nostalgia in it, the nostalgia of a sick, lacerated soul. It contains in solution all the most objectionable and most endearing qualities of the master. Perhaps we have heard its sweet, highly perfumed measures too often. Its interpretation is a matter of taste. Kullak has written ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... a vague misery, a burden of unutterable nostalgia, troubles the loneliness of our soul. And yet it is not, this vague longing, a mere desire to break the isolating circle of the "I am I" and to invade, and mingle with, other personalities. It is something deeper than this, it is a desire to break ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... the new war-poetry which is particularly pathetic is that which is inspired by the nostalgia of home, by the longing in the midst of the guns and the dust and the lice for the silent woodlands and cool waters of England. When this is combined with the sense of extreme youth, and of a certain brave and beautiful innocence, the poignancy of it is almost more ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... the possibility of hiring one of the soldiers' two-tiered beds for the afternoon. Perhaps it is the first two syllables of Hoboken's name that make it so desperately debilitating to the wayfarer in an April noonshine. Perhaps it was a kind of old nostalgia, for the Secretary remembered that sailormen's street as it had been some years ago, when he had been along there in search of ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... body; suggests strongly that heredity. It is patently the expression of a personality who desired exuberant bright sound and color, needed the brandishing of blades and the shrilling of Tartar fifes and the leaping dance of Tartar archers, had nostalgia for the savage life that had spawned upon the steppes. And as such it is distinct from that of the other composers of the group. His music has none of the piercingness and poignancy and irony, none of the deep humility and grim ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... in hospitals and asylums needs thoughtful consideration, for there we meet with all kinds of discord. An emotional song, for example, which would give pleasure to one, might sadden another, and a patient suffering from nostalgia would not be benefited by ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... romance and travel. But the real journey—the journey of adventure itself—is frequently another matter: often gray, often loverless, often demanding from the secret soul of the adventurer spirit and inspiration, lest the blood turn cold in sick dismay, and the brain cloud under its weight of nostalgia. ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... the number and range of interests seen to be common and the clearness with which social relations are realized. While maturity of character needs some solitude, too much dwarfs it, and more or less of the same paralysis of association follows which is described in the nostalgia of arctic journeys, deserts, being lost in the jungle, solitary confinement, and in the interesting stories of feral men.[26] In some of these cases the mind is saved from entire stultification by pets, imaginary companions, tasks, etc. Normally "the tendency to solitude ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... domestic divinity.... I am at home again; it is half-past six in the evening, and I have eaten nothing since this morning. Berlin is the city of ennui; I should die here in a week. Poor Humboldt is dying of it; he drags with him everywhere his nostalgia for Paris." ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... Yorkshire—that is enough for me. I languish for the starting of the train which shall convey me thither. I begin to understand the nostalgia of the mountain herdsman: I pine for that northern air, those fresh pure breezes blowing over moor and wold—though I am not quite clear, by the bye, as to the exact nature of a wold. I pant, I yearn for Yorkshire. I, the cockney, ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... symptom will throw light upon this case of nostalgia (as it were) produced by breaking away from an old habit; in itself it is trifling, one of the myriad nothings which are as rings in a coat of chain-mail enveloping the soul in a network of iron. One of the keenest pleasures of Pons' old life, one of the joys of the ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... speaking of this said that early in the autumn the reserves were pretty homesick. They wanted to get back to their wives and children. Nostalgia, next to hunger, is the worst thing for a soldier. Commanders were worried. But as winter wore on the spirit changed. The soldiers began to feel the spell of their democratic comradeship. The fact that they had fought together and survived together played its part; and individualism was sunk in the ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... go to Paris, then to my villa at Mont Boron. I have the nostalgia of my own country, you see. Then to ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... reach the imported English flannel seat of Coulter's expensively-tailored pants. But it was sufficient to jolt him out of his reverie, trebly induced by a four-course luncheon with cocktails and liqueur, the nostalgia of returning to a hometown unvisited in twenty years and the fact that he was driving westward ...
— A World Apart • Samuel Kimball Merwin
... in the sharp hazes of wood smoke, when the whole army seemed nestling into itself, laughing, covering its nostalgia, putting on its strength, Peter met in certain moments the advisability of turning his back upon Boylan and Spenski and Samarc. The extraordinary nature of Berthe Wyndham would flood home to him, as to one to whom it belonged, very dear but ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... the harmony of the world. The law of laws is, that every fragment of the universe derived from God returns to Him and desires to return to Him. The universe is an emanation from the perfect, and an effort towards perfection. The universe is a God in exile who has nostalgia for himself. The universe is a progressive descent from God with a tendency towards reintegration ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... Nostalgia, Frederick suggested, was probably the universal ill from which all Germans in America suffered. The Friesian refused to admit it, and Frederick observed in unchanged form that characteristic in his friend which made of him at once the well-informed practical man of affairs and the undismayed ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... called) is so ready and obliging; and then the provisions is excellent. Who would not take a trip to Margate? There's only one thing that rather adulterates the felicity—a drop of gall in the cup of mead!—and that is the horrid sea-sickness! learnedly called nostalgia; but call it by any name you please, like a stray dog, it is ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... seemingly very real at the time. Great emotion, for instance, drives it forth, explaining thus appearances at a distance, and a hundred other phenomena that my investigations of abnormal personality have forced me to recognize as true. And nostalgia often is the means of egress, the channel along which all the inner forces and desires of the heart stream elsewhere toward their fulfillment in ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... hesitation and misgiving we try to express what we feel about them! They are indeed the sanctuaries of England, sanctuaries in which it is wiser to pray than to exult, since their beauty and antiquity, their repose and quietness, fill us with an extraordinary uneasiness and amazement, a kind of nostalgia which nothing really our own can satisfy. For if Winchester appeals to us as the symbol of England, it is not the England of our day for which she stands. Let Manchester or Sheffield stand for that, places so unquiet, so meanly wretched ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... was the battle of Polotsk in which the Bavarians distinguished themselves. There were no medicines for the wounded, not even drinking water, no bread, no salt. Of the many unhealthy places in Russia this is the worst, it swarms with insects. Nostalgia was prevailing. They had a so-called dying chamber in the hospital for which the soldiers were longing, to rest there on straw, never to ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... what strength I had left I secured a dictionary, and found that "nostalgia" means homesickness;—a disease not known to Washingtonian exiles—but what "ossification of the pericardium" means I cannot discover. Not only have I searched every dictionary in the Congressional Library, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... song—who knows! When Charles Kingsley was asked for the secret of his exquisite sympathy and fine imagination, he paused a space, and then answered—"I had a friend." The desire for friendship is strong in every human heart. We crave the companionship of those who can understand. The nostalgia of life presses, we sigh for "home," and long for the presence of one who sympathizes with our aspirations, comprehends our hopes and is able to partake of our joys. A thought is not our own until we impart it to another, and the confessional ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... that, as her mood of yesterday sent her inland to pacify her imagination by gazing at the peaceful English country-side, so her present mood sent her down to the shore to satisfy, or rather further stimulate, her nostalgia for the East by gazing ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... Their nostalgia probably does not play them false, even though conditions in many places are better now than in the intermediate past, after modern times had settled in, but before INCOPOT and the Soil Conservation Service and such influences had begun ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... All the nostalgia of the Scottish isles was in the minors of that song.... And it was like a lullaby.... And the wind hummed through the rigging.... And underneath was the flow and throb of the immense circulation of the sea.... And overhead the helmsman rang the ship's bell. Tung-tung, tung-tung, ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... 29th of January, ten days before Bonaparte's departure for Syria. Bonaparte was sorry to part with him; but he could not endure to see an old friend, and one who had served him well in all his campaigns, dying before his eyes, the victim of nostalgia and romantic love. Besides, Berthier had been for some time past, anything but active in the discharge of his duties. His passion, which amounted almost to madness, impaired the feeble faculties with which nature had endowed him. Some writers have ranked him in the class of sentimental lovers: ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, v3 • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... weary of art which had no meaning for her. Her child-like enthusiasms, which at first both delighted and embarrassed her husband, faded gradually away; the present not only lost its charm, but she began to look backward to the homely airs and scenes of Fife, and to suffer from a nostalgia that grew ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... to the enormous estate left him by his father, bound up in a single trust company. But his thoughts were always three thousand miles away, in that delectable city of cities, Paris. For Paris he suffered a painful nostalgia. There he met his true brethren, while in New York he felt an alien. He was one. The city, with its high, narrow streets—granite tunnels; its rude reverberations; its colourless, toiling barbarians, with their undistinguished physiognomies, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... twenty minutes before a blank sheet of foolscap, Lenox gave up all further effort at mental concentration. A nostalgia of vast untenanted spaces was upon him,—of those great glacier regions where a man could stand alone with God and the universe, could shake himself free from the fret of personal desire. And he had ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... you'll feel wonderfully well." In fact, I use some special music that I had recorded for inducing hypnosis. The first musical selection is Brahms' "Lullaby." Children's music boxes invariably contain this selection, and the melody cannot help but activate a pleasant nostalgia. It is a memory associated with love and tenderness. This brings us to the fact that hypnosis may offer the subject a chance to escape from the reality of pressing problems into a state of complete irresponsibility. In fact, one theory of hypnosis equates the hypnotic state as a form of unconscious ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... her son, whose hair she stroked, as if to exorcise, by the evidence of present duty, the nostalgia which possessed her at the thought of an affection sacrificed forever. Hers was a nature too active, too habituated to the British virtue of self-control to submit to ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... gens-la. Ordinarily they rendezvoused in the Taverne Tourtel of St. Germains, and that gloomy palace shared their devotions with Scotland, whence they came and of which they were eternally talking, like men in a nostalgia. James and his Jacquette were within these walls, often indifferent enough, I fear, about the cause our friends were exiled there for; and Charles, between Luneville and Liege or Poland and London, was not at the time an inspiring object of veneration, ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... his long beard with his thin fingers. "This is a difficult situation indeed. There must not be a cat on the premises, or the King will assuredly have nervous prostration. Yet the Queen must have a cat or she will pine quite away with nostalgia." ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... dying by hundreds from sunstroke they were dying by thousands from frost. But these heroic and devoted people struggled on, believing that they were becoming acclimated faster than the climate was becoming insupportable. Those called away on business were even afflicted with nostalgia, and with a fatal infatuation returned to grill or freeze, according to the season of their arrival. Finally there was no summer at all, though the last flash of heat slew several millions and set most of their cities ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... Alhamid with a straight face. "Say, one year out of every ten. It would give the people something to look forward to with anticipation and to look back upon with nostalgia." Then he changed his tone. "If you wish to debate theories of government, Mr. Tarnhorst, possibly we could get up a couple of teams. Make a public affair of it. It could be taped and televised here and on Earth, and we ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... background of ghostly whitish blue. The dreamlike quality of the town was perhaps enhanced for her eyes by the veil she was wearing—in daytime no longer white. As the music died out of her, elation also ebbed. Somebody had passed her, speaking German, and she was overwhelmed by a rush of nostalgia. On this moonlight night by the banks of the Rhine—whence she came—the orchards would be heavy with apples; there would be murmurs, and sweet scents; the old castle would stand out clear, high over the woods and the chalky-white river. There would ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... Lambert, raising his shoulders. "But I understand your feelings. On occasions we all have the nostalgia of the primitive life at times, and delight to pass ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... back to her a sudden powerful nostalgia for the life she had once known. And had old Beef Bissell been aware of this nostalgia, he would have realized for the first time that in his desire to give his daughter everything he had created a situation that was already unfortunate and might, with ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... New York, Washington, Europe, and for a moment nostalgia overwhelmed her. If Howard would only take her home for a visit! Alas! he was as little likely to do that as to give ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... people, who seemed to her strange, dangerous animals. She felt abandoned and more alone than before. She thought with longing about her innocent homeland: about the breezy sky, about the laughing young gentlemen, about tennis matches, and she felt nostalgia for the Sunday afternoons—she took off her garters, placed her little bodice on a chair. She ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... heard whistled about the streets, but does not know well enough to reproduce. How he envies the light-hearted robins, whose house-hunting consists merely in a gay flitting from twig to twig. Yet, even in his disturbance and nostalgia of spirit, he comforts himself with the common consolation of his cronies—"Oh, well, one always finds something"—and thus (in the words of good Sir Thomas Browne) teaches his haggard and unreclaimed reason to stoop unto ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... this case was that the man was regularly nourished and increased in weight ten pounds. It was noted that, some months before, this patient was injured and had suffered extreme depression, which was attributed to nostalgia, after which he began to have intermittent and temporary attacks, which culminated as related. Camuset and Planes in January, 1896, mention a man who began to have grand hallucinations in 1883. In March, 1884, he exhibited the first ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... happiness in it through all the troubles of life. And the return to Oxford, to its memories, its libraries, its stately, imperishable beauty, was delightful to him. So also, I think, for some years, was the sense of intellectual freedom. Then began a kind of nostalgia, which grew and grew till it took him back to the Catholic haven in 1876, never ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... at leaving so rich and beautiful a land lying waste. None had seen a country more supremely attractive. Emotions of tenderness, of sadness, also came to many. Nostalgia was not yet shaken off. This strained condition of nerves, combined with the trail hardships, produced the physical irritation which is inevitable in all amateur pioneer work. Confusions, discordances, arising over the most trifling circumstances, grew into petulance, incivility, wrangling ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... the river front, where he strayed alter a time, having mistaken the way to King's College. He walked back through Wall Street, and his enthusiasm was beginning to ebb, he was feeling the first pangs of a lonely nostalgia, when he almost ran into Ned Stevens's arms. It was four years since they had met. Stevens had grown a foot and Alexander a few inches, but both were boyish in appearance still and recognized each ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton |
