christian living on Nostalgia

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”

In her book Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home , Jen Pollock Michel reflects on the nature of home in a transient age. In this short excerpt, Michel focuses on the language associate...

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

On a trip to France during college, I (Cyd) was walking through a historic garden in Paris with my older sister. Rounding one of the reflecting pools, we both caught a familiar scent and stopped dead ...

“I remember it like it was yesterday. Of course, I don’t really remember yesterday all that well.”

Gratitude changes the pangs of memory into a tranquil joy.

When we remember the past, it is not only the past; it breaks into the present and gains a new lease on life.

It is not the experience of today that drives us mad; it is the remorse or bitterness for something which happened yesterday.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

"Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was."

I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect.

The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.

Nothing cures ingratitude as quickly as a good memory.

Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.

Barbara Brown Taylor recounts her first experience with caving, the exploration of caves that are not prepared or made easily accessible for inexperienced explorers. Her guides gave her a bit of helpf...

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between the past, present, and future ultimately meaningless: to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that s...

Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart.

In her excellent little book (Mythical Me), Richella Parham describes the importance of looking on the past with grace: Developing a redemptive memory requires recalling not only the pain of the pas...

Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.

“Shall we never never get rid of this Past? … It lies upon the Present like a giant’s dead body.”

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

What we . . . refer to confidently as memory . . . is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.

And time remembered is grief forgotten, And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, And in green underwood and cover Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

When we keep purchasing, keep consuming, and keep envying and coveting, we are pining for what the objects represent: peace, ease, meaning, beauty, stability, adventure, knowledge, renown, connection,...

Friendship consists in forgetting what one gives, and remembering what one receives

How vast a memory has love!