"Nostalgia" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... against this species of scientific nostalgia? After employing every means that family life afforded her, she called society to the rescue, and gave two "cafes" every week. Cafes at Douai took the place of teas. A cafe was an assemblage which, during a whole evening, the guests sipped the delicious wines and liqueurs which overflow ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... gone right, and the Devil would have lost a good fellow. As it is"—he smiled with his usual conceited delight in his own sayings, even when they were uttered in soliloquy—"he is merely one of those splendid gentlemen one will meet with in hell." Then Dodson had a momentary nostalgia for goodness himself, but he soon overcame it, and stretching himself on ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... Manderson in this later period that lay long unknown and unsuspected save by a few, his secretaries and lieutenants and certain of the associates of his bygone hurling time. This little circle knew that Manderson, the pillar of sound business and stability in the markets, had his hours of nostalgia for the lively times when the Street had trembled at his name. It was, said one of them, as if Blackbeard had settled down as a decent merchant in Bristol on the spoils of the Main. Now and then the pirate would glare suddenly out, ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... 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 ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... went into society because it was his world; and he attended in a perfunctory manner 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, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... 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 schooners of ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... trailing arbutus, that lovely little flower that grows beneath the snow; how one brushes back the snow in early Spring and finds the waxen, sweet, pink flowers and dark, shining leaves under it. And I always imagine that it is a doubled nostalgia that I feel and that my mother's Norway in Spring was like it, with snow and wet woods. There is a line that brings it all over me: 'In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes.' It is by Emerson. The Spring here is very lovely, too, but ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... said 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 could ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... the spotless spouse of the son of Parsifal, standing by the window, has assisted at the mystery of the chaste soul awaiting the coming of her predestined lover,' And 'He who has seen her as Elizabeth, ascending the hillside, has felt the nostalgia of the skies awaken in his heart,' Then he goes on to say that her special genius and her antecedents led her to 'Fidelio,' and designed her as the perfect embodiment of Leonore's soul—that pure, ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... her there lived a shadowy affection. On occasions in which they had been separated there had always awakened in him an uneasiness. In his nights alone he lay sleepless, oppressed, a nostalgia for her presence growing in him. With his eyes opened at the darkness of a strange room he experienced then an incompleteness as if he himself were not enough. The emptiness in which he was living became suddenly real. He would feel a despair. Words ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... sank into an inexplicable nostalgia; he dragged the back of a hand impatiently across his vision. His persistent indifference, the inhibition that held him in a contemptuous isolation, again possessed him, Howat, a black Penny. A last trace of his emotion, caught in the flood of his paramount disdain, ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... 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 ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, v3 • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... to Paris, then to my villa at Mont Boron. I have the nostalgia of my own country, you see. Then to Venice ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... boarded the Kanzlar the pains of nostalgia were sweeping over the respectable members of Chinde society like waves of nausea, and tearing them. With a grim appreciation of their own condition, they smiled mockingly at the ladies on the quarter-deck, as you have seen prisoners grin through the bars; they were even boisterous ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... thing, hardly bigger than one's two closed fists, should be able to exert such an influence over one! For this face it was—the pale oval, in the dark setting, the exotic colouring, the heavy-lidded eyes—which held him; it was this face which drew him surely back with a vital nostalgia—a homesickness for the sight of her and the touch of her—if he were too long absent. It had not been any coincidence of temperament or sympathies—by rights, all the rights of their different natures, they had not belonged together—any more than ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... 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, but I have pervaded all the bookstores, and made myself ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... in the country had at present had an opportunity that equaled her own. Look at it how she would, throb as she might with a woman's immemorial nostalgia for a true man's love, she could not escape the relentless logic of the situation. It was not the hour for her to choose her own pleasure. She must march to battle leaving love behind, as the heroic had done since love and combat were ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... or were transported to Virginia, they brought with them as much of England as possible in their manners, their customs, their pride in family and race, their laws and their possessions. With something of nostalgia for home, they often named their plantations for the family estates in England, and the locales, in which they settled, for the shires or the communities near their old world homes. They did not seek to create a new race, as did the Spanish in settling Louisiana who ...
— Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 17 • Annie Lash Jester
... loved and saw the sun set behind that rampart of low hills—Virginia, the Greek slave Acte, Agnes, Cecilia, who sang as she lay dying in her house over there in the Trasteverine quarter. Ah, I shall go away and have the nostalgia of Rome to the end of my life." He paused to light another cigarette. "Come and look at the picture. I have not dared to see it again myself since ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... who calls himself "Chappie" but "Baw Jove" he never saw the other side of the Atlantic if I am any judge. But you can hand these people any sort of pill and they'll swallow it without making a face. We have no indigestible pleasures here, but the food. I am suffering from gastric nostalgia. I was so hungry for something sharp and sour last night that I bought a bottle of horse-radish and ate it in cold blood. Today my digestive apparatus is slumped and I feel like the ragged ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... 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 signs of sleep, and on March ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... strange sadness seemed to have fallen upon him; he cared no more for plans for slave-trading in the interior, or plunder in the desert. The scent of the white woman's skin and hair was in his nostrils; the nostalgia of the pavement had found him, and he knew he must leave the desert. One morning he was missed in the Sahara, and a fortnight after he was seen in ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... few observations on the principal diseases to which these Indian convicts were liable may be found useful; and we take for the purpose the statistics of the year 1863-64 as given in Appendix No. 2, when nostalgia did not occur. In alluding to these diseases, we shall at the same time notice the locality of the Singapore jail, and the composition of the soil on which it was built. It is now universally recognised that the ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... 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 ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... mechanical way. Here it is all delicate—a study of nuances and subtle relationships. For Ralph, though perfect in the 1820 manner, has something of the changeling about him—something that gradually makes people think him "queer," and in the end arouses in him the dim beginnings of nostalgia for his own time. It is a fascinating theme as Henry James works it out—doubly fascinating as he talks about it to himself in the "scenario" that is published along with the story. In the latter we see the author groping for his story, almost like a medium in a trance. ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... with a poetic drama to be called The King of the Beggars, and it was not until the close of the third year that he settled down to definite work. Then all his energies were concentrated on a new play—The Gipsy. A young woman of Bohemian origin is suddenly taken with the nostalgia of the tent, and leaves her husband and her home to wander with those of her race. He had read portions of this play to his friends, who at last succeeded in driving Montague Ford, the popular actor-manager, ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... that dreams have been proven in dogs, horses, and a large number of birds; that certain animals, especially in anger, seem to be subject to delusions and pursued by phantoms; and lastly, that in some there is produced a condition resembling nostalgia, expressing itself in a violent desire to return to former haunts, or in a wasting away resulting from the absence of accustomed persons and things. All these facts, especially the latter, can hardly be explained without a vivid recollection of the ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... toward 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 the ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... imprint of that 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 ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... his juniors. The mechanics treated him as being in a class apart and respected him since the day when, to the prejudice of good order and military discipline, he had followed a homesick boy who had deserted, found him and hammered him until nostalgia would have been a welcome relief. All deserters are shot, and the youth having at first decided that death was preferable to a repetition of the thrashing he had received, changed his mind ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... and I benefited a good deal by his offices during the two years I spent in Trieste, and I have always thought that he had a considerable share in obtaining my recall. That was my great object in those days; I was a victim to nostalgia, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... with time more frequent, as well as of longer duration; and with them the boy noticed that the longing to escape became once again intense. He wanted to get home, wherever home was; he experienced a sort of nostalgia for the body, though he could not remember where that body lay. But when he asked the governess what this feeling meant, she only mystified him by her answers, saying that every one, in the body or out of it, felt a deep longing for their final home, though they might not have ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... to which the flesh is said to be heir. The selection of music 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 a melody ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... place gets into your mind and creates nostalgia when you are far from it. But Greenwich Village gets into your heart, and you will never be quite able to lose the magic of it all the days ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... of what, essentially, was nostalgia. The fact that I was really leaving an old course of life, was actually and finally breaking with it, became vividly apparent. Lea, you see, stood for what was best in the mode of thought that I was casting aside. ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... at Parliament, but always behind the screen. And constantly she wrote out her thoughts on the themes of the time. Her husband never regarded these things as proof that she was inwardly miserable, unsatisfied, and in spirit was roaming the universe seeking a panacea for soul-nostalgia; not ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... possession of her, all her veins were in a paroxysm of violent sensation. 'Good God!' she exclaimed to herself, 'what is this?' And then, a moment after, she was saying assuredly, 'I shall know more of that man.' She was tortured with desire to see him again, a nostalgia, a necessity to see him again, to make sure it was not all a mistake, that she was not deluding herself, that she really felt this strange and overwhelming sensation on his account, this knowledge of him in her essence, this powerful apprehension ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... and to the place where the stockade had been. It was a lonely place, the stockade walls fallen and scattered and the graves of Humbolt's mother and all the others long since obliterated by the hooves of the unicorn legions. Bitter memories were reawakened, tinged by the years with nostalgia, and the stockade was far behind them before the dark ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... of nostalgia swept over him. Back at Oostpoort, the power was nuclear, but this little settlement made use of the cheapest, most obviously available power source. It was dotted with more than a ...
— Wind • Charles Louis Fontenay
... our approach, stood on the little porch to welcome me. Mrs. Hopper gave a peculiar glance at my begrimed person and face, and I followed her up the narrow stairs with an odd, homesick sinking of the heart, seized by a momentary pang of that "nostalgia of the pavement," felt oftener by the poor than rich dwellers of the city, in exile. Perhaps I loved New York in an inverse ratio to what I had suffered in it. All the miseries of hope deferred, unremitting labor, and unnumbered petty cares attendant upon a straightened income, were ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... gone with the longing for home, which the physicians have gone so far as to esteem a disease under the name of Nostalgia. Indeed, I can find hardly anybody in the ship clear of its effects, but the Captain, Dr. Solander, and myself, and we three have ample constant employment for our minds, which I believe to be the best if not ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... her, riding with hawk and hound, visiting about the neighbourhood, driving into Oxford, that Denzil was of opinion her ailments were of the spirits only, a kind of rustic malady to which most fine ladies were subject, the nostalgia of paving-stones and oil lamps. Henriette—she now insisted upon discarding her nick-name—was less volatile than in London, and missed her aunt sorely, and quarrelled with mademoiselle, who was painfully strict upon all points of speech and manners. George's days of unalloyed ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon |
