Nostalgia is about love and life
Smell and touch are also strong evokers of nostalgia and memories in general due to the processing of these stimuli first passing through the amygdala, the emotional seat of the brain. These recollections of our past are usually important events, people we care about, and places where we have spent time. Music can also be a strong trigger of nostalgia.

“There are a few moments in your life when you are truly and completely happy, and you remember to give thanks. Even as it happens you are nostalgic for the moment, you are tucking it away in your scrapbook.” ― David Benioff, When the Nines Roll Over and Other Stories.

Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you. Jonathan Safran Foer

“Ten long trips around the sun since I last saw that smile, but only joy and thankfulness that on a tiny world in the vastness, for a couple of moments in the immensity of time, we were one.”
― Ann Druyan

“When people talk about the good old days, I say to people, ‘It’s not the days that are old, it’s you that’s old.’ I hate the good old days. What is important is that today is good.”
― Karl Lagerfeld

“It shocks me how I wish for…what is lost and cannot come back.” ― Sue Monk Kidd, Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story

“I’d trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday.”
― Kris Kristofferson

“We are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
― Carson McCullers

“What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.” ― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems

“You can go other places, all right – you can live on the other side of the world, but you can’t ever leave home”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Mermaid Chair

“how sad and bad and mad it was – but then, how it was sweet”
― Robert Browning

“Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.” ― Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” ― Marcel Proust

“I don’t have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They’re upstairs in my socks.” ― Groucho Marx

“Nostalgia is a necessary thing, I believe, and a way for all of us to find peace in that which we have accomplished, or even failed to accomplish. At the same time, if nostalgia precipitates actions to return to that fabled, rosy-painted time, particularly in one who believes his life to be a failure, then it is an empty thing, doomed to produce nothing but frustration and an even greater sense of failure.”
― R.A. Salvatore, Streams of Silver

“The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.” ― Rob Sheffield, Love is a Mix Tape

“When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago–and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail–it’s disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you do. Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story

Nostalgia is about love and life