In Greek, ‘nostalgia’ literally means the pain from an old wound’. It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards and forwards, it takes us to a place where we ache to go again.
Beitragsformat-Archive:
It’s a sickness. It’s a fever. It’s a kind of hypnosis. I can only explain it by saying that I want to be alone in a room with you. I want to be under your spell.
Philip Roth, Exit Ghost
Am liebsten reise ich, gleich wohin, allein, wie ich auch am liebsten allein gehe.
Thomas Bernhard, Holzfällen.
All I can say is that I am mad about you. I tried to write a letter and I couldn’t. I am waiting impatiently to see you. Tuesday is so far off. And not just Tuesday- I am wondering when you will come to stay overnight, when I can have you for a long spell. It torments me to see you just a few hours and then surrender you. When I see you, all that I wanted to say vanishes. The time is so precious and words are extraneous. But you make me so happy, because I can talk to you.
I live in perpetual expectancy. You come and time slips away in a dream. It is only when you go that I realize completely your presence. And then it is too late.
Henry Miller to Anaïs Nin (via falseknights)
I was going to try not to think about her except at night before I went to sleep. But now I was tired and there was nothing to do, so I lay and thought about her.
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell To Arms (via stoicremains)
The habit of solitude, of solitude without anguish, had taken hold of me, and with it the pleasures of being unanswerable and being free-paradoxically, free above all of oneself. (…) Loneliness, raving loneliness, was sporadic and amenable to strategy: should it sweep over me during the day, I’d leave my desk and go for a five-mile walk in the woods or along the river, and when it insinuated itself at night, I’d temporarily put aside the book I was reading and listen to something requiring the whole of my attention -something, say, like a Bartók quartet.
Philip Roth, Exit Ghost
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd; the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (via falseknights)
preemptive nostalgia of the possible but doubtful
Manchmal wird man weich, aber man fängt sich wieder. Ermüdungserscheinungen! Wie beim Stahl. Gefühle, so habe ich festgestellt, sind Ermüdungserscheinungen, nichts weiter, jedenfalls bei mir.
Max Frisch: Homo Faber, S. 129 f.
Because you were meant to sail, not to anchor.
Will Chancelor – A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (p. 175).
Jeder Mensch erfindet sich früher oder später eine Geschichte, die er für sein Leben hält.
Max Frisch // Mein Name sei Gantenbein (via distancedifference)