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Nostalgia   Listen
noun
nostalgia  n.  
1.
(Med.) Homesickness; esp., a severe and sometimes fatal form of melancholia, due to homesickness.
2.
A sentimental yearning to return to an earlier time remembered as happier or more pleasant, or a former place evoking happy memories; a longing to experience again a former happy time; as, a nostalgia for the brotherhood of the Woodstock music festival; a nostalgia for the comradeship of one's college friends.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Nostalgia" Quotes from Famous Books



... say—than an adopted child of Britain; for the colonising instinct of the British race renders its sentimental devotion to the country of its engendering less burdened with the passionate intimate sorrows of the exile than the nostalgia of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... 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, with their undistinguished physiognomies, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... magnificence," replied Lambert, raising his shoulders. "But I understand your feelings. On occasions we all have the nostalgia of the primitive life at times, and delight to ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume

... again, who stabbed the American swindler at Monte Carlo, was tracked after a few days to his native place, St. Valentin, in the Zillerthal. It is always so. Mountaineers in distress fly to their mountains. It is a part of their nostalgia. I know it from within, too: if I were in poor Hugo LeGeyt's place, what do you think I would do? Why, hide myself at once in the greenest ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen

... Uncle Remus' Brer Fox, he lay low, resisting the gnawing discontent that kept screening delectable visions of Broadway and the Upper Forties and Seventh Avenue before his homesick eyes. It was a real nostalgia from which he suffered. He endured it, though, with what patience he might lest a worse thing befall. And at the end of that month he went back to the big town; an overpowering temptation was the reason for his going. ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb

... Their nostalgia probably does not play them false, even though conditions in many places are better now than in the intermediate past, after modern times had settled in, but before INCOPOT and the Soil Conservation Service and such influences had begun to push for reform ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior

... Hazzards and the Billy Smiths were possible panaceas, but what could they bring to ease the pangs of a secret nostalgia? Nothing but their own blissful contentment, their own happiness to make my loneliness seem all the more horrible by contrast. Would it not be better for me to face it alone? Would it not be better to live the life of ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon

... poems exhibit a playful, charming side to Brooke's imagination; but if I could have only one of his pieces, I should assuredly choose Grantchester. Nostalgia is the mother of much fine poetry; but seldom has the expression of it been mingled more exquisitely with humour and longing. By the rivers of Babylon he sat down and laughed when he remembered Zion. And his laughter at Babylon is so different from his laughter at Grantchester. ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps

... his exquisite sympathy and fine imagination, he paused a space, and then answered—"I had a friend." The desire for friendship is strong in every human heart. We crave the companionship of those who can understand. The nostalgia of life presses, we sigh for "home," and long for the presence of one who sympathizes with our aspirations, comprehends our hopes and is able to partake of our joys. A thought is not our own until ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... leave Cairo on the 29th 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 which ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... misgiving we try to express what we feel about them! They are indeed the sanctuaries of England, sanctuaries in which it is wiser to pray than to exult, since their beauty and antiquity, their repose and quietness, fill us with an extraordinary uneasiness and amazement, a kind of nostalgia which nothing really our own can satisfy. For if Winchester appeals to us as the symbol of England, it is not the England of our day for which she stands. Let Manchester or Sheffield stand for that, places so unquiet, so meanly wretched ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton

... see brother scientists of his own way of thinking would seize him, and he would abruptly depart for London, to occupy quiet lodgings, and indulge in intercourse with his fellow-men. Braddock rarely gave early intimation of his urban nostalgia. At breakfast he would suddenly announce that the fit took him to go to London, and he would drive to Jessum along with Cockatoo to catch the ten o'clock train to London. Sometimes he sent the Kanaka back; at other times he would ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume

... State to address this body of probationers and others. Personally I am always delighted at any reason, good or bad, that brings me to Oxford. A great deal of Cherwell water has flowed under Magdalen Bridge, since I was an undergraduate here, and I have a feeling of nostalgia, when I think of Oxford and come to Oxford. The reminiscences of one's younger days are apt to have in older times an ironical tinge, but that is not for any of you to-day to consider. I am glad to know that of the fifty odd members of the Civil Service ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)

... I trust, O thou Sindbad." And he replied, "Yes, one more; but to our dear native land this time." In fact, I, too, was beginning to suffer from nostalgia, and was much desirous of returning home." But Shakib is in such a business tangle that he could not extricate himself in a day. So, they tarry another year in New York, the one meanwhile unravelling his affairs, settling with his creditors and collecting what few debts ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... the cave, haunted by the 'nostalgia' that made Bethlehem seem so fair and dear, may stand for us as an example of the longings and thirsts that sometimes force themselves into consciousness in every soul. Below the bustle and strife of daily life, occupied ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... this time lowered his tail to half-mast, and kept strictly to the beaten path, notwithstanding manifold temptations to forsake it. He passed two cats without a single insulting remark, and his entire demeanor was eloquent of nostalgia. ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... which followed the reunion of his two natures, so powerfully disunited for a time; he was drawn towards the parsonage, then towards Minna, by the sight of the every-day home life for which he thirsted as the wandering European thirsts for his native land when nostalgia seizes him amid the fairy scenes of Orient that have seduced his senses. More weary than he had ever yet been, Wilfrid dropped into a chair and looked about him for a time, like a man who awakens from sleep. Monsieur ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac

... feature of this 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 10th ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... spring fever and lassitude. They considered the possibility of hiring one of the 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 ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley



Words linked to "Nostalgia" :   longing, yearning, nostalgic, homesickness, hungriness



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