Le Salon - The Gramophone Years: Contributions

Hello everyone. Thankyou for making last Sunday's event such a success. Of course there is lots of room for improvement and we have taken a lot of your suggestions on board.
Le Salon/Is-Salott has created this blog to share some of the contributions, poems, essays and quotes tossed into the arena last Sunday..and what an eclectic selection we have on offer..
Anchored as it was in the 1930's, 40's and 50's, the themes interweaving 'The Gramophone Years' were Belonging and Nostalgia

To start off some quotations:
On BELONGING

Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.
Alexander Theroux

“She didn't belong anywhere and she never really belonged to anyone. And everyone else belonged somewhere and to someone. People thought she was too wonderful. But she only wanted to belong to someone. People always thought she was too wonderful to belong to them or that something too wonderful would hurt too much to lose. And that's why she liked him-- because he just thought she was crazy.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“The voice so filled with nostalgia that you could almost see the memories floating through the blue smoke, memories not only of music and joy and youth, but perhaps, of dreams. They listened to the music, each hearing it in his own way, feeling relaxed and a part of the music, a part of each other, and almost a part of the world. ”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream

“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”
― Brene Brown

“[I]t doesn’t matter whom you love or where you move from or to, you always take yourself with you. If you don’t know who you are, or if you’ve forgotten or misplaced her, then you’ll always feel as if you don’t belong. Anywhere. (xiii)”
― Sarah Breathnach, Moving On: Creating Your House of Belonging with Simple Abundance

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

“Before, I wanted to say: "I found love!" But now, I want to say: "I found a person. And he belongs to me and I belong to him.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“I been with strangers all day and they treated me like family. I come in here to family and you treat me like a stranger.”
― August Wilson, The Piano Lesson

“I wonder whether there is such a thing as a sense of individuality. Is it all a facade, covering a deep need to belong? Are we simply pack animals desperately trying to pretend we are not?”
― Rabih Alameddine, I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters

On NOSTALGIA

“…nostalgia is, by definition, the least authentic of all feelings.”
― Enrique de Hériz, Lies

“Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.”
― Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy

“Philosophy is really nostalgia, the desire to be at home.”
― Novalis

“Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed.”
― John Green

“There is no greater sorrow
Than to recall a happy time
When miserable.”
― Dante Alighieri

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

“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

“It's one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed's drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can't go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you--they're not, don't flatter yourself, they couldn't care less--but because once you're in orbit and you return to Reed's drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha's Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.”
― Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book