“The evening of a well spent youth brings it's lamps with it.”
Nostalgic feeling
Nostalgic Quotes — page 132 of 136
“When I was younger, I was one of the few girls in the neighborhood who could break dance. That's kind of my local, ghetto-celebrity claim to fame.”
“What is a family, after all, except memories? Haphazard and precious as the contents of a catch-all drawer in the kitchen.”
“I feel akin to [William] Shakespeare in the sense that, as I see it, he lived to dramatize the unfailingly exciting, unfathomably strange interplay among human beings that constitutes "scenes" in his plays, and constitutes "story" in prose fiction.”
“To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child, the whole tradition is lost.”
“I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.”
“Art is a means of memorialization of the past, a record of a rapidly vanishing world; a means of exorcising, at least temporarily, the ravages of homesickness. To speak of 'what is past, or passing or to come'-in the most meticulous language thereby to assure its permanence; to honor those we've loved and learned from and must outlive.”
“We are all regionalists in our origins, however 'universal' our themes and characters, and without our cherished hometowns and childhood landscapes to nourish us, we would be like plants set in shallow soil. Our souls must take root - almost literally.”
“Childhood is the province of the imagination and when I immerse myself in it, I re-create it as it was, as it could have been, as I wanted - and didn't want - it to be.”
“I always tell my students the same thing. And that's to live life, and to read very voraciously without any definite program. To travel, to meet people, to talk to people, to listen very carefully, and not interrupt, but listen to their own grandparents speak of their families.”
“I've always been so interested in personal history. I'm very fascinated by my parents' and my grandparents' generations. I seem to think that they had a resilience and an integrity that may be somewhat deficient in my own generation, and in subsequent generations as well, because America has been rather easy to live in since the Depression.”
“Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense.”
“Growing up in the fifties and sixties, I can only remember knowing one child, ever, whose parents got a divorce, and hardly any whose mother "worked" at anything besides raising her children.”
“Though [John] Hughes did provide for us, if we wanted, to go to a local high school and try to blend in. Michael [Hall] and Molly [Ringwald ] already had school to go to with their tutors. Ally [Sheedy] wanted nothing to do with high school. She said, "I remember it fine. I don't want to go back." Which is great. So Emilio [Estevez] and I went. And Emilio lasted a couple hours because people recognized him from The Outsiders that had already been out, so his cover was blown.”
“Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior.”
“I have much clearer memories of my time in Egypt: songs on the radio, the rhythms that accompanied belly dancers, the sound of the adhan - the Muslim call to prayer. I just soaked it all up.”
“Wherever it is you make your home, there is always this other place, this other person, calling to you. Come to me. Come back.”
“Memories may escape the action of the will, may sleep a long time, but when stirred by the right influence, though that influence be light as a shadow, they flash into full stature and life with everything in place”
“Where are the songs of Spring? Aye, where are they? Think not of them; thou has thy music too.”
“It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.”