Compared with that, Angie thinks, what is there for us in the present? — Nostalgia

"But I’ve also observed a tendency, over my years as an SF reader, for SF writers of a certain age to give the After Us The Deluge speech, so I promised myself I’d try to be watchful of the onset of that, try to fend it off as best I could. I suspect that when people notice how much of the world they grew up has already ended, it’s quite natural to feel that the world is ending. Because the world one knew quite demonstrably is. But it always has been ending, that way. You can read the ancient Greeks, say, doing it at great length. When younger, though, this sounds like something one can simply choose to avoid, just as old people, to the young, appear to have made some sort of inexplicably terrible decision to become old."

"Hopes can be disappointed. Nostalgia is irrefutable."

"Nostalgia, as his Uncle Joshua had said, aint what it used to be."

"Nostalgia is denial. Denial of the painful present. The name for this denial is Golden Age thinking - the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one ones living in - its a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present."

"Do not say: How is it that former times were better than these? For it is not out of wisdom that you ask about this."

"Nostalgia is a seductive liar."