Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

But I am not allowed to forget
The taste of the tears of yesterday.

...memory can restore to life everything except smells, although nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

Nostalgia is not indulgence. Nostalgia tells us we are in the presence of imminent revelation, about to break through the present structures held together by the way we have remembered: something we thought we understood but that we are now about to fully understand, something already lived but not fully lived, issuing not from our future but from something already experienced; something that was important, but something to which we did not grant importance enough, something now wanting to be lived again, at the depth to which it first invited us but which we originally refused. Nostalgia is not an immersion in the past, nostalgia is the first annunciation that the past as we know it is coming to an end.

Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.

Yesterday’s misery had become nostalgic fondness.

For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it's a pity we use it so little.

Nostalgia is my vice. Nostalgia is a melancholy, and slightly saccharine, sentiment, like tenderness

Nostalgia is powerful. It is natural, human, to long for the past, particularly when we can remember our histories as better than they were.

Or poking through a house, in closets shut for years,
Full of the scent of time - acrid, musky, dank,
One comes, perhaps, upon a flask of memories
In whose escaping scent a soul returns to life.

- <i> The Flask</i>

Somehow I cannot let it go yet, funeral though it is,
Let it remain back there on its nail suspended,
With pink, blue, yellow, all blanch'd, and the white now gray
and ashy,
One wither'd rose put years ago for thee, dear friend;
But I do not forget thee. Hast thou then faded?
Is the odor exhaled? Are the colors, vitalities, dead?
No, while memories subtly play — the past vivid as ever;
For but last night I woke, and in that spectral ring saw thee,
Thy smile, eyes, face, calm, silent, loving as ever:
So let the wreath hang still awhile within my eye-reach,
It is not yet dead to me, nor even pallid.

Remembrance is the only paradise out of which we cannot be driven away. Pleasure is the flower that fades, remembrance is the lasting perfume. Remembrances last longer than present realities; I have preserved blossoms for many years, but never fruits.

To enjoy your past is to live twice.
Nostalgia links your past and present.

When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered...the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls...bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory