Andi Chorley

“Like many of those who lived through the Second World War, he had witnessed the horrifying consequences of overly myopic nationalism – a sentiment he partially blamed on nostalgic tendencies among people who had never quite managed to wrest themselves from the fantasies of youth and the family. Fascism, for him, was an unintended consequence of societies that were resistant to change.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“I was free from the tangle of mistakes, promises, and defeats that grips a man's heels, taunts him with flashes of its sinewy strength.”
― I.S. Berry, The Peacock and the Sparrow

“Davis was one of the first social scientists to theorize nostalgia. He argued that nostalgia made false use of the past. It is a reconstruction of events that can never offer a perfect facsimile. As a result, nostalgia tells us more about the present, its moods and anxieties, than about past realities.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”
― T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding