Sunday, December 23, 2012 – Christmas Nostalgia
I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. ~ Charles Dickens
Christmas is a time when you get homesick – even when you’re home. ~ Carol Nelson
There’s nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child. ~ Erma Bombeck
We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today. I don’t think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great. If you’re hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time. ~ Art Buchwald
Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. ~ William Ralph Inge
It’s never safe to be nostalgic about something until you’re absolutely certain there’s no chance of its coming back. ~ Bill Vaughn
Nostalgia’s the most commercial commodity there is today; I believe it’s true all over the world. ~ Stan Kenton
Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind. We wallow in nostalgia but manage to get it all wrong. True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories … but American-style nostalgia is about as ephemeral as copyrighted déjà vu. ~ Florence E. King
I prefer the mystic clouds of nostalgia to the real thing, to be honest. ~ Robert Wyatt
If you go flying back through time, and you see somebody else flying forward into the future, it’s probably best to avoid eye contact. ~ Jack Handy
Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days. ~ Doug Larson
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. ~ Louis Hector Berlioz
Things ain’t what they used to be and probably never was. ~ Will Rogers
Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better. ~ John Steinbeck
Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery. ~ Albert Camus
Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we have never had. ~ Mignon McLaughlin
It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn’t wait to leave. ~ Anatole Broyard
Soon, Nostalgia will be another name for Europe. ~ Angela Carter
There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go. ~ Tennessee Williams
It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. ~ Frank Zappa
Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine. ~ Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. ~ Umberto Eco
I felt like poisoning a monk. ~ Umberto Eco, on why he wrote the novel “The Name of the Rose”
I hear that in many places something has happened to Christmas; that it is changing from a time of merriment and carefree gaiety to a holiday which is filled with tedium; that many people dread the day and the obligation to give Christmas presents is a nightmare to weary, bored souls; that the children of enlightened parents no longer believe in Santa Claus; that all in all, the effort to be happy and have pleasure makes many honest hearts grow dark with despair instead of beaming with good will and cheerfulness. ~Julia Peterkin, A Plantation Christmas, 1934
Christmas makes everything twice as sad. ~ Doug Copland
Christmas is a holiday that persecutes the lonely, the frayed, and the rejected. ~ Jimmy Cannon
I never believed in Santa Claus because I knew no white dude would come into my neighborhood after dark. ~ Dick Gregory
What I don’t like about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day. ~ Phyllis Diller
Santa is very jolly because he knows where all the bad girls live. ~ Dennis Miller
There are some people who want to throw their arms round you simply because it is Christmas; there are other people who want to strangle you simply because it is Christmas. ~ Robert Staughton Lynd
I do like Christmas on the whole…. In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year. ~ E. M. Forster
Instead of being a time of unusual behavior, Christmas is perhaps the only time in the year when people can obey their natural impulses and express their true sentiments without feeling self-conscious and, perhaps, foolish. Christmas, in short, is about the only chance a man has to be himself. ~ Francis C. Farley
A lovely thing about Christmas is that it’s compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together. ~ Garrison Keillor
Just Above Sunset 