Quotes / Nostalgia Filter

"No matter how golden an age, there will always be someone complaining that everything looks too yellow."

— Randall Jarrell

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Blogs

One of the people working on a Dick Tracy-derived performance that involves multiple layers of nostalgia, each resonating with a smaller and smaller audience, feels so unfulfilled by the exercise that he needs to drink himself stupid in order to carry on with it! Hopefully this is not a disturbing look behind the scenes at the strip.

— The Comics Curmudgeon on Dick Track

Hi and Lois has apparently decided to embrace its status as one of the squarest comics in syndication by just doing a whole week of "weren’t things different and maybe better in decades past?" Yesterday we had "Cars sure were larger and less fuel efficient back when gas was cheaper"; today we’ve got "remember when everyone used to watch TV, before the entertainment options available today existed?" Super psyched to see if they can drag this out for another four days!

— The Comics Curmudgeon, "Modern-day Hi lets his freak flag fly by wearing stripes"

Patient: All these Goosebumps books follow a clear formula of artificial threats mixed with ludicrous actual threats, coupled with a dozen or more recurrent conventions that I studiously document every entry. And then, every once in a while, the author will just throw in some weird garbage that unfolds for six or seven pages before being revealed to be a dream. R. L. Stine loves non sequitur dream sequences like Tumblr users love Skins. Ack, see, I can't stop!
Doctor: I guess in a sense even your being here is a reference, since you were referred to me! <The patient proceeded to give me a stern, disapproving glare> Sorry... So, you were saying that the entries themselves are hard to write?
Patient: No, that's not it. It's just that I kind of feel like all of the nostalgic glee that used to fuel my earlier entries has been replaced with easy tomato-lobbing — I didn't read [the Series 2000 books] when I was a kid, it's hard for me to figure the appeal this new series has for anyone, and thus making fun of something that obviously sucks seems like something less than a challenge.

— Blogger Beware on Earth Geeks Must Go!

Film — Live-Action

"It's old rock. That doesn't make it classic. What sucked back then still sucks today."

— Matt Farrell, Live Free or Die Hard

Ian "The Shark" O'Malley: To tell you the truth, I stick to the classics. Rock 'n' roll's been all downhill since Lennon died.
Chazz: My whole life, people have been cramming this classic rock crap down my throat. Do you think I give a shit about The Beatles?
Ian: No offense, but today's music doesn't have a whole lot to say.
Chazz: Is that right? So you're gonna tell me that "Purple Haze" says something?

— Airheads

Karen: Your jokes have gotten really corny.
Bullwinkle: No they haven't, they were always that bad. When you were a kid, you didn't notice.

— The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle

Literature

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

— Opening line of A Tale of Two Cities, quoted on the box of the first (1989) Trivial Pursuit 1980s Edition

"Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were."

— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme,
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,
Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty's best,
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
I see their antique pen would have express'd
Even such a beauty as you master now.
So all their praises are but prophecies
Of this our time, all you prefiguring;
And for they looked but with divining eyes,
They had not skill enough your worth to sing:
For we, which now behold these present days,
Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

— William Shakespeare, "Sonnet 106"

"Anything before you're thirty-five is new and exciting, and anything after that is proof the world’s going to hell."

— Daniel Suarez, Influx

"I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip."

— Ignatius J. Reilly, A Confederacy of Dunces

"...confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years."

— A Rose for Emily

"Farewell, Romance!" the Cave-men said;
With bone well carved He went away,
Flint arms the ignoble arrowhead,
And jasper tips the spear to-day.
Changed are the Gods of Hunt and Dance,
And He with these. Farewell, Romance!"

— Rudyard Kipling, "The King"

"Mauvais souvenirs, soyez pourtant les bienvenus [Unhappy memories! Yet be welcome]
vous êtes ma jeunesse lointaine...[for you are my distant youth.]"

— Georges Courteline, quoted as an epigraph for the film, Army of Shadows by Jean-Pierre Melville.

"Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be."

—Hiro, Snow Crash

"See, that's the problem with putting too much stock in the old days. You remember all the GOOD stuff, but you forget about the time you got spanked by your best friend's mom."

— Greg Heffley, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Old School

I could see the return of barbaric codes, of implacable gods, of unquestioned despotism of savage chieftains, a world broken up into enemy states and eternally prey to insecurity ...Our epoch, the faults and limitations of which I knew better than anyone else, would perhaps be considered one day, by contrast, as one of the golden ages of man.

— Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs Of Hadrian (translated by Grace Frick)

In the past, men were handsome and great (now they are children and dwarfs), but this is merely one of the many facts that demonstrate the disaster of an aging world. The young no longer want to study anything, learning is in decline, the whole world walks on its head, blind men lead others equally blind and cause the to plunge into the abyss, birds leave the nest before they can fly, the jackass plays the lyre, oxen dance. Mary no longer loves the contemplative life and Martha no longer loves the active life, Leah is sterile, Rachel has a carnal eye, Cato visits brothels, Lucretius becomes a woman. Everything is on the wrong path.

— The Name of the Rose

"There's a natural tendency in American political life to think that things were always better in the past. The passions of previous years fade, to be inevitably replaced by the passions of the present. Nostalgia is a powerful force, and in the maelstrom of the moment many of us seek comfort in imagining that once there was a Camelot—without quite remembering that the Arthurian legend itself was about a court riven by ambition and infidelity. One point of this book is to remind us that imperfection is the rule, not the exception."

— Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

"When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that."

— The Handmaid's Tale

Live-Action TV

"I have tender feelings for Nixon, because everybody has warm feelings about their childhood. Actually, I didn't like the Watergate trials 'cause they interrupted The Munsters."

— Stephen Colbert

Music

Yeah, things were simpler then
You ask exactly when.

— The New Pornographers, "Sweet Talk Sweet Talk"

As your body floats down Third Street
With the burn smell factory closing up
Yes it's sad to say, you will romanticize
All the things you've known before

— They Might Be Giants, "Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head"

We recognize the present
Is half as pleasant
As our nostalgia for
A past that we resented
Recast and reinvented
Until it's how we meant it

— Barenaked Ladies, Testing 1, 2, 3

When I was a little man
Play-Doh came in a little can
I was Star Wars' biggest fan
Now I'm stuck without a plan
G.I. Joe was an action man
Shaggy drove the Mystery Van
Devo was my favorite band
Take me back to my happy land

— The Aquabats!, "Play Dough!"

You know the good old days weren't always good
Tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems

— Billy Joel, "Keeping the Faith"

Now I just sit in the corner complaining
Making out things were best in the '80s

— Steven Wilson, "12 Things I Forgot"

"My Favorite Things" are playing again and again
But it`s by Julie Andrews, and not by John Coltrane
Endless balmy breezes and perfect sunsets framed
Vintage wine for breakfast, and naked starlets floating in Champagne
All the passions of your youth are tranquilized and tamed
You may think it looks familiar, though you may know it by another name...

— Elvis Costello, "This is Hell"

They've been spending most their lives
Living in a pastime paradise
They've been spending most their lives
Living in a pastime paradise
They've been wasting most their time
Glorifying days long gone behind
They've been wasting most their days
In remembrance of ignorance oldest praise

— Stevie Wonder, "Pastime Paradise"

'Cause back in my day, we didn't need no feel-good pills and no psychiatrists!
No, we just bled out in our baths,
And god damn it, we liked it!

—Will Wood, "Marsha, Thankk You for the Dialectics, but I Need You to Leave"

Newspaper Comics

Roger: Andy, you can't judge Captain Goofballon a day-to-day basis, or even a month-to-month one! You have to look at the broader body of work!
Andy: How broad?
Roger: When I was 13, the strip was a riot.
Andy: And just as you are no longer 13...

— FoxTrot

Religion and Mythology

"Say not, 'Why were the former days better than these?' For it is not from wisdom that you ask this."

— The Bible, Ecclesiastes 7:10

"And no one, having drunk old wine, immediately desires new; for he says, ‘The old is better.’"

— Jesus Christ; Luke 5:39

Tabletop Games

Perhaps my memories of my neonate days are hopelessly romantic, but now I find myself surrounded by new waves of foreigners, cheaply available handguns and drugs far more addictive than anything in my day. Gone are the smoky opium dens where we could expect to feed on the occasional Chinaman, the factories from which I could lure fatigued children...I tire of this new age. Instead, I must content myself'' with reverie, remembering the golden age of the Nosferatu and the glory of Victorian London.

—Vampire: The Masquerade - Clanbook: Nosferatu (Revised)

Theatre

Kids!
You can talk and talk till your face is blue!
Kids!
But they still do just what they want to do!
Why can't they be like we were?
Perfect in every way?
What's the matter with kids today?

—Bye Bye Birdie, "Kids"

"Forward, America! Forward! ...to the hallowed principles of our forefathers! Forward! ...to the sweet tranquility of the status quo! Forward! ...to yesterday!"

—Sen. Billboard Rawkins, Finian's Rainbow

Video Games

Reinhardt: Ahhh, you kids today with your techno music. You should enjoy the classics, like Hasselhoff!^note For reference, the game is set in the 2070's.
Lucio: Tsk! Oh man, I can't even take you seriously right now!

—Overwatch

"You were better when you were a sidescroller, man..."

—Jean-Pierre Colored Pencils the Twelfth to Mario just before dying, Paper Mario: The Origami King

Web Animation

"It's easy to get nostalgia goggles stuck on your face and assume that we did everything better back in the day, But that just isn't the case. The truth is the way we do things can always be improved upon, and over time, businesses, products, technologies, and even entire industries are phased out as we develop new and better ways of doing things. This is known as creative destruction. It's what allowed horse-driven carriages to be replaced by cars, fireplaces to be replaced by furnaces, dial-up to be replaced by Wi-Fi, video rental stores to be replaced by streaming services, and yes, it's even allowing for certain traditional stores to be replaced by online markets, And that's a good thing."

— Seamus Coughlin, Common Sense Soapbox

"'Narrator:''' [T]he 50s was a nice time to live

Father: We're as prosperous as ever! My wife loves me, my children respect me, and I'm able to provide for my family with a single income. […]

Mother: My husband is strong and masculine. He can easily protect and provide for us all, and the food at the grocery store is delicious and healthy. […]

Child: I have plenty of friends and we play outside all day. But I like to read too. I'm not sat in front of a screen 24/7.[…]

—FreedomToons

"Nostalgia is like putting cocaine infused marbles into your mouth in that it makes you say stupid things."

— Zero Punctuation

"Remember the nineties? The Nineties were so much better. Everything was better in the Nineties. Here are the Nineties. If you don't remember, you did not have a childhood. You were not a child. You retroactively did not exist. Remember Bobby's World? It was a good show! You're too young to remember. It was a good show! We had Nintendo 64. You don't. Things were better then. Now all is lost. Including hope, which is dead."

— Ukinojoe, 90s Nick

Webcomics

Goldenloin: I just meant... there was a time. Before. Things were simpler. We were together. It was... good.
Ballister: It was never that good. You always remember things as being better than they were.

—NIMONA

Web Original

What is happening? Good fucking God, MOVE ON. The reason there hasn't been a new Cobain to emerge on the scene lately is because everyone is so busy reading reviews of the latest In Utero remastering.

—Drew Magary, Make It Stop

John Elway is the perfect GM for this team because he never bothers to hide his contempt for it...Remember, this team won a Super Bowl not that long ago, and yet it can never live up to Elway’s expectations for it. Broncos fans are the EXACT same way. Even Notre Dame fans are more reasonable by comparison. There is some mythical universe in which the Broncos win 15 Super Bowls in a row, with a 23-year-old Elway at the helm for every one of them. For both Elway and these fans, traveling to that dimension is still considered a reasonable expectation to have. Anything short of that and this team gets a RIVER of complaints.

—Drew Magary, "Why Your Team Sucks 2020: Denver Broncos"

I know everybody does this but, as with so many unpleasant habits, the British seem exceptionally proficient at it. It’s a speciality national vice of ours, like refusing to learn other peoples’ languages, or celebrity paedophilia. The now-defunct British gift-shop chain Past Times (now, ironically, a thing of the past; a casualty of the recession, and vanished from high streets) catered to all nostalgic tastes in their weirdly postmodern high street premises. They used to iterate in every high street in every British town, cluttered with overpriced gubbins like replica WWII wireless sets (containing modern digital radios) jostling alongside faux-Saxon jewelry. Which of the confabulated blue-remembered-hills you yearn for depends upon your age and class position. There’s a serried layer of people in Britain whose chosen locus of nostalgia is the pre-modern or early-modern; another reason for those swarms of middle-brow biographies of Elizabeth I and Henry IV (and so on) which infest every branch of Waterstones.

—Jack Graham, "Bring Back the Stocks!"

Nostalgia is never a return to the actual time. It’s a specific reconstruction of the past, a rewriting of it, to soothe present-tense anxieties. Boomer lust for WWII was a simultaneous lame tribute to dying vets (Happy Father’s Day! Here’s another copy of The Greatest Generation!) and a slap in the face to their slacker kids, Generation X.

—Molly Brown, "Time Travel and the New Nostalgia"

We watch I Love the 80s to wax nostalgic about movies that we have no nostalgia for in order to build up the illusion of nostalgia for the purposes of being made to buy something new, but at every turn the actual object of pleasure is displaced — the fun is somewhere else. Dreadful practice. To be avoided at all costs.

—Dr. El Sandifer

So, next time you’re feeling nostalgic about how great Quakeworld or the original Donkey Kong Country was, I recommend going with it. It’ll make you feel better even if you overlook the problems at the time or the improvements that have been made since. Just don’t over commit yourself to any opinions born of memory’s fickle biases. Because graph paper, himem.sys, and two buttons on a controller were worse than you really remember.

— "Why We Get Nostalgic About Good Old Games" by Jamie Madigan

* Stone Cold should come back and give John Cena a stunner.
* WWE should try and get the old WWF name and scratch logo back.
* John Cena is the worst wrestler in the world. Anyone that praises Cena in any way is a terrible wrestling fan.
* Although... turning him heel may make him good again.
* Children and women are the cancer of professional wrestling.
* Although, children can redeem themselves by watching Attitude Era clips and favoring it over today's product.

—Taimapedia, Popular YouTube Wrestling Community Opinions

Schlafly’s work was pivotal in the victory of the “pro-family” movement over the Equal Rights Amendment...For instance, she laments the loss of “real men” who went to war to save damsels in distress, men like the draft dodging wife beater John Wayne.

—Encyclopedia of American Loons on Phyllis Schlafly

Waah, where’s the glorious philosopher-kings who’ll take me back to their enlightened caves and regale me with their vast manly wisdom and fawn over how intelligent and philosophical I am before sheathing off their heavy robes and—? Oh yeah, hurgygurgy, something something cocktail chit-chat has gone downhill these days.

—Cerberus, "But Nobody Bleeds For the Hack Writer"

Living in the modern world is hard. Trying to be a decent person in a diverse, pluralistic society takes work, and there will inevitably be missteps along the way. All of us across the political spectrum believe that democracy has problems, the government has problems, 'political correctness' has problems. But even in its most innocent form...a dislike of 'political correctness' and the modern world can take you to some very ugly places very fast—the past was, as only some of us have the privilege of forgetting, a very ugly place.

—Arthur Chu, "Occupying the Throne"

"BACK IN MY DAY, YOU HAD TO BREAK A BONE, KILL THREE COWS WITH YOUR BARE HANDS AND FIGHT A BOA CONSTRICTOR TO MAKE A GOOD COMPLAINT!"

— Chaotic-AlterEgo is sick of people getting nostalgic over "bad" things

"Now that there's a NEW Generation of Pokémon, I immediately abandon ALL the hatred I had of Gen III and IV in favour of saying how much the Gen V sucks. I hated Gen III? when?"

— Quote from VGF.

Fond memories of The A-Team ruined by watching it.

— The Daily Mash headline

"The West Wing isn't just liberal fantasy porn. It's liberal fantasy porn from 20 years ago. It portrays a universe in which one good speech filled with soaring rhetoric and an impassioned argument could convince Republicans to 'do the right thing.' Even back then, it was the type of thing you could only take seriously if got yourself blitzed on a jenkem-like mixture of idealism, naivety, and sniffing your own farts. But fast-forward to 2020, and The West Wing feels so divorced from the realities of current politics that it might as well be a cooking show on the planet Glarglack."

— Cracked, "'The West Wing' Was A Useless Fairy Tale"

Web Video

"It's old, and it came from the era of hand-drawn animation which gets it instant clout. Imagine if this movie was CGI and they released it now. An extremely literal coming-of-age dinosaur movie with dark atmosphere and beautiful backgrounds, but frankly ugly dinosaurs. With a very basic story which skews to a very young audience despite the dark tone, despite the fact that it comes from a studio which historically has made deeper stuff. Oh, wait, all of that stuff I just said did happen. It was called The Good Dinosaur and it got mediocre reviews and lost a lot of money."

— Jenny Nicholson, "I’m on lockdown so I watched all 14 Land Before Times"

Kid: You know this is a kids' movie, right? It's not like the Turtles were better in your day.
Narrator: They were!
Vanilla Ice: [starts dancing]
Narrator: Ugh. Touché.

— Honest Trailers,Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

"Fuck anime! Anime used to be good. Or I used to be dumber."

— Pat, Two Best Friends Play: Eternal Darkness

"If anyone tells you that they miss The '80s, point them to this song and ask if they still do."

— Bennett the Sage, on Milli Vanilli's "Baby Don't Forget My Number"

"Nostalgia can be a bad thing. It can skew your perception. But in the context of these spaces, and in many others, it can help you figure out the things you really enjoy."

— PatMac, "The Beauty of Nostalgic Liminal Spaces"

Western Animation

"You know, in retrospect, I may have over-romanticised those memories."

— Phineas Flynn, Phineas and Ferb

"Every great empire reaches a point where going backward can seem more appealing than going forward. When the world is changing so fast, it makes us yearn for the old ways when life seemed simpler. But it doesn't mean those old ideas are good for us now. We have to face one reality as a country."

—Randy Marsh, South Park

Mr. Mackey: I know it's amazing! This is all a dream come true! You know... the past few days, I've been reliving the past. But during this tournament, I started to change. And I just wanna say to the Russians - if I can change you can change. I know how it is when you're gettin' old, you know, and you're gettin' aggressive because your dick doesn't work the way it used to.
Vladimir Putin: Da... da.
Mr. Mackey: But just because our dicks don't work doesn't mean we should go back to the way things were. In the immortal words of Sting we all share the same biology. Regardless of ideology.

— South Park, Back To The Cold War

Real Life

"Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine.''

— G. K. Chesterton, 1924

"The past is to be respected and acknowledged, but not to be worshipped. It is our future in which we will find our greatness."

— Pierre Trudeau, 1970

"There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present and invoke the security of a past, which in fact, never existed."

— Robert F. Kennedy

"Yesterday is yesterday. If we try to recapture it, we will only lose tomorrow."

— Bill Clinton, speech at the University of North Carolina's 200th Anniversary

"In the post historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual care taking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed."

— Francis Fukuyama, The End of History

"Being the lice lady was quite a good job in those days as so many of us were lousey a good deal of the time. Whenever I see the visual cliche of a character scratching his head as if deep in thought, I am transported back to my happy, lousey childhood."

— Tom Baker, Who on Earth is Tom Baker?

"Nostalgia is a treacherous emotion, at once a curse against the present and an admission of permanent resentment, never to be wholly trusted."

— Pete Hamill, New York magazine

"It's an Orwellian quirk of this country that we are extremely fond of our heritage of bloody murder, the gore of yore, the poisonings, bodysnatchings, and slit throats of a reassuringly long time ago."

— David Stubbs, The Guardian

"Not only are all ages in chart pop equal, chart pop never changes, it only appears to change on its surface level."

— "Lord Rock" and "Time Boy", The Manual

"The Golden Age of Science Fiction is 'twelve'."

— Peter Graham, science fiction fan

"Whatever movie trend you complained about at the time will eventually provoke nostalgia."

— Kim Newman, Empire magazine

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