Nostalgia can be more painful than a surgeon's knife.

Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar...

True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories

From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions - fear, desire, anger - serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost . . . .

I suffer from chronic nostalgia. Looking back makes me dizzy, queasy, and I yearn for it, ache for it. I want it back; maybe the homesickness will leave then.

But it’s not the way I remember it. I long for a past that I didn’t have, for the same experiences with different emotions, without the pain, without the ambivalence, without the fear. My heart remembers two different lives and I long for the one I can only see now, in retrospect.

There is nothing more agonising than the memory of good times when you are going through a difficult period in life. Life moves in only one direction - forward, but the memoirs of years gone by keep on haunting one’s soul till the time one is alive. Nostalgia can be more painful than a surgeon’s knife.