80s Nostalgia Quotes

I wanted a Blaine but ended up with a Duckie. ~ Ashley Edward Miller

Back in the "leather and lace" eighties, I was the fantasy editor for a publishing company in New York City. It was a great time to be young and footloose on the streets of Manhattan - punk rock and folk music were everywhere; Blondie, the Eurythmics, Cyndi Lauper, and Prince were all strutting their stuff on the newly created MTV; and the eighties' sense of style meant I could wear my scruffy black leather into the office without turning too many heads. The fantasy field was growing by leaps and bounds, and I was right in the middle of it, working with authors I'd worshiped as a teen, and finding new ones to encourage and publish. ~ Terri Windling

The population, who are, ultimately, indifferent to public affairs and even to their own interests, negotiate this indifference with an equally spectral partner and one that is similarly indifferent to its own will: the government [Ie pouvoir] . This game between zombies may stabilize in the long term. The Year 2000 will not take place in that an era of indifference to time itself - and therefore to the symbolic term of the millennium - will be ushered in by negotiation.

Nowadays, you have to go straight from money to money, telegraphically so to speak, by direct transfer (that is the viral side of the matter). A viral revolution, then, more akin to the Glass Bead Game than to the steam engine, and admirably personified in Bernard Tapie's playboy face. For the look of money is reflected in faces. Gone are the hideous old capitalists, the old-style industrial barons wearing the masks of the suffering they have inflicted. Now there are only dashing playboys, sporty and sexual, true knights of industry, wearing the mask of the happiness they spread all around themselves.

The world put on a show of despair after 1968. It's been putting on a big show of hope since 1980. No more tears, alright? Reaganite optimism, the pump ing up of the dollar. Fabius's glossy new look. Patriotic conviviality. Reluctance prohibited. The old pessimism was produced by the idea that things were getting worse and worse. The new pessimism is produced by the fact that everything i ~ Jean Baudrillard

Michael [Hutchence] is hands down one of the greatest frontmen in music. The style, the voice - all of it. Any way that I was ever influenced by him really comes down to small, pale imitations compared to the real thing. There is a fearlessness about him. Watching him at Wembley Stadium with 70,000 people, he looks as comfortable as if he were in his own living room. ~ Lori Majewski

I wouldn't characterize it as an 80s nostalgia thing. For me, at least. The Corcoran show was actually almost a reportage. The exhibit was, in many ways, pretty unique. It was one of the first pieces about DC culture that doesn't include some marble building or the Kennedy Center. ~ Ian MacKaye

I knew I wanted to do a show on NBC - it's rooted in its history; it's part rooted in nostalgia and part rooted in the potential of it. For me, there was no other choice. ~ Jerrod Carmichael

Mesmerized, all she can do is watch this piece of her life move off; all she can do is watch it and suffer. She is experiencing a brand-new feeling called nostalgia. That feeling, that irrepressible yearning to return, suddenly reveals to her the existence of the past, the power of the past, of her past; in the house of her life [ ... ] from now on her existence will be inconceivable without these feelings. ~ Milan Kundera

I guess personally I really like "Take on Me" by Aha. I think it just defines the 80s and how insane it was and like neon and like calculator watches and that whole thing. ~ Evan Peters

That's why it's important to try to live in the present. The present is the only place we can live. When we live in the present, we are alert to what's actually happening -- to us and in the world at large. We can then act based on that awareness. And financial planning based on reality tends to lead to better results.

By contrast, when we live in the future, we are lost in fantasy or fear. When we live in the past, we are lost in regret or nostalgia. Financial planning based on fantasy, fear, regret, and nostalgia is likely to lead to more of the same. ~ Carl Richards

In the early '80s, I happened to find myself in the vicinity of people who would work for Microsoft five years later. ~ William Gibson

Middlemarch offers what George Eliot calls, in a wonderfully suggestive turn of phrase, "the home epic"- the momentous, ordinary journey traveled by most of us who have not even thought of aspiring to sainthood. The home epic has its own nostalgia - not for a country left behind but for a childhood landscape lost. ~ Rebecca Mead

After the comedy boom of the '80s, there was a certain formula that comedians had to do and could do in order to be successful touring comedians, and those were mainly observational comedians who had a very strict structure of what made an act, and I think it was very performance oriented. ~ Scott Aukerman

Maybe that's just what nostalgia is: a willingness to embrace the pain of the past. ~ Sarah Domet

America has no now. We're reluctant to acknowledge the present. It's too embarrassing.
Instead, we reach into the past. Our culture is composed of sequels, reruns, remakes, revivals, reissues, re-releases, recreations, reenactments, adaptations, anniversaries, memorabilia, oldies radio, and nostalgia record collections. World War II has been refought so many times, the Germans and Japanese are now drawing residuals. ~ George Carlin

I think - I don't know, maybe it's nostalgia. But the choice, losing the choice to be able to use film is going to be - it's gone. It's going to be gone. ~ Keanu Reeves

I am impressed with just the enthusiasm for life and the fact that some of these people are in their 80's, even 90's, and they're absolutely determined to get out there and make a difference. ~ Richard Branson

I spent a few years here in Memphis, in the late '70s and early '80s, where I was studying a lot of country blues players and their styles. So it seems like every record I'll do, I will appropriate these blues styles that I remember. ~ Alex Chilton

I watched a lot of YouTube videos of cute geeky girls playing '80s cover tunes on ukuleles. Technically, this wasn't part of my research, but I had a serious cute-geeky-girls-playing-ukuleles fetish that I can neither explain nor defend. ~ Ernest Cline

Sometimes, I write '60s or '80s style pop songs. ~ Peter Steele

I would often sit in the corner of the room wearing Dad's massive headphones, carefully replaying the records time after time. It was something I did frequently throughout my childhood with music, comedy and film, inspiring my own creative imagination, the headphones rendering the experience intensely personal, as though it were all happening inside my own head. ~ Simon Pegg

We, in the late '60s, '70s and '80s, are acting like we have just discovered freedom and liberation. But I'm sure that many women have worked for that for such a long time. ~ Angeles Mastretta

From the '70s and '80s, the following songs immediately spring to my mind as candidates: "The Battle of Evermore," "Spirit of Eden," "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed," "Close to the Edge," "In Your Eyes," "Thick as a Brick," "Cinema Show," "Echoes," and "The Killing Moon. ~ Bradley J. Birzer

Because honor still matters. Honor is what echoes. His father's words. But they are as empty on his lips as they feel in my ears. This was has taken everything from him. I see in his eyes how broken he is. how terribly hard he is trying to be his father's son. If he could, he would choose to be back by the campfire we made in the highlands of the Institute. He would return to the days of glory when life was simple, when friends seemed true. But wishing for the past doesn't clean the blood from either of our hands. ~ Pierce Brown

Well, when I started modeling in the mid-'80s, the girls who did shows did shows, and the girls who did magazines did magazines. That's what was understood. ~ Naomi Campbell

I think film had a terrible effect on horror fiction particularly in the 80s, with certain writers turning out stuff as slick and cliched as Hollywood movies. ~ Poppy Z. Brite

My dad was an actor, and my older sister is an actress, and so I very much remember thinking, "Well, of course I'll do that as well." But I never imagined myself as an actor who would be in films. I always only thought of myself being in a play or a musical and maybe the odd episode of [U.K. '80s TV drama] Casualty. My backup plan was to do something with children, to start a nursery school or work with underprivileged kids. And I still dream of maybe doing that in some way. I've always got children in my house, always. ~ Kate Winslet

As life speeds by, nostalgia has a shorter pregnancy. Games still in progress are given the straight-to-sepia status of "Instant Classics" no matter how oxymoronic that phrase appears. ~ Steve Rushin

I did love horror films from the '70s and '80s. That was my sweet spot. ~ Drew Barrymore

Nostalgia is predicated on something that never existed. ~ Kate Atkinson

I closed my eyes and I thought of the lash of her skirt snapping around her as she danced one evening in a bar on the South Side to a jukebox that was playing "Barefootin'," of the downy slope of her neck and the declivity in her nightgown as she bent to wash her face in the bathroom sink, of a tuna salad sandwich she'd handed me one windy afternoon as we sat at a picnic table in Lucia, California, and looked out for the passage of whales, and I felt that I loved Emily insofar as I loved those things – beyond reason, and with a longing that made me want to hang my head – but it was a love that felt an awful lot like nostalgia. ~ Michael Chabon

Wig Out At Jagbags is inspired by Cologne, Germany, Mark Von Schlegell, Rosemarie Trockel, Von Spar and Jan Lankisch, Can and Gas; Stephen-Malkmus-imagined Weezer/Chili Peppers, Sic Alps, UVA in the late 80's, NYRB, Aroma Charlottenburg, inactivity, Jamming, Indie guys trying to sound Memphis, Flipper, Pete Townshend, Pavement, The Joggers, The NBA and home life in the 2010's ... ~ Stephen Malkmus

People are People still gets played to death on '80s stations. It was our first big break in America. It's not exactly my favorite song. ~ Martin Gore

Never has nostalgia held stronger sway; never has the belief in the redemptive possibilities of the future seemed so laughable. ~ Ann Marlowe

It was a cultural revolution, and was not directed at instituting economic changes. He could thus appeal to old prejudices without threatening the existing economic system. This appealed, above all, to white-collar workers and the small entrepreneurs, as some of the statistics presented in this book will demonstrate. It was their kind of revolution: the ideology would give them a new status, free them from isolation in the industrial society, and give them a purpose in life. But it would not threaten any of their vested interests; indeed it would reinforce their bourgeois predilections toward family...and restore the 'good old values' which had been so sadly dismantled by modernity. ~ George L. Mosse

Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar ... ~ William Faulkner

There was a time when emigration from Cuba was a definitive separation. There were no visits. In the '80s, '90s, it was incredibly difficult. I'm not the only one interested in this as a filmmaker - other Cuban filmmakers have dealt with it, too, because it's such a part of our reality. ~ Fernando Perez

Finally, and even more seriously, I fear a return to the international climate that prevailed in the 1920s and 30s, when the United States withdrew from the global stage and countries everywhere pursued what they perceived to be their own interests without regard to larger and more enduring goals. When arguing that every age has its own Fascism, the Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi added that the critical point can be reached "not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralysing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned." If he is right (and I think he is), we have reason to be concerned by the gathering array of political and social currents buffeting us today - currents propelled by the dark underside of the technological revolution, the corroding effects of power, the American president's disrespect for truth and the widening acceptance of dehumanising insults, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism as being within the bounds of normal public debate. We are not there yet, but these feel like signposts on the road back to an era when Fascism found nourishment and individual tragedies were multiplied millions-fold. ~ Madeleine K. Albright

I really ought to have recognized it for what it was and, perhaps, to have stopped right there - for it was nostalgia, and what inspires nostalgia has been dead a long time ~ Michael Chabon

the taste for Victorian-era sci-fi futures is more than anything else a nostalgia for the last moment, before the carnage of World War I, when everyone could safely feel a redemptive future was possible. ~ David Graeber

Ever since I first used a computer in the early '80s, I've thought of it as a fundamentally new medium for the dissemination of ideas which can transform people's lives and the society we live in. ~ Mike McCue

I'm doing good. I've had a slight nervous breakdown in the '60s. I got through that. And I got through the '70s. And I was in a doctor's program during the '80s and then I met Melinda and we've been together ever since. I've got a happy life. ~ Brian Wilson

…we can only hope that the evocative Welsh word hiraeth will be preserved. It means 'distant pain', and I know all about it…But, and this is important, it always refers to a near-umbilical attachment to a place, not just free-floating nostalgia or a droopy houndlike wistfulness of the longing we associate with human love. No, this is a word about the pain of loving a place. ~ Sally Mann

I never took any writing classes or planned to write. But I was working as an advertising copywriter in the late '80s and thought, 'What a shame there has never been a decent book on Jean Harlow,' then thought, 'Why don't I write one myself?' being kind of an idiot and not having the slightest idea what I was getting myself into. ~ Eve Golden

My character on 'I'm In the Band,' Derek Jupiter of Iron Weasel, is definitely one of the crazier ones. That's completely on the other end of the spectrum. There's absolutely nothing like Derek any shape or form. I'm having so much fun playing this egotistical, '80s-era rockstar - everything he does is from the point-of-view of a rockstar. ~ Steve Valentine

I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feeling save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories. ~ Annie Dillard

I dance around my living room to cheesy '80s aerobics music until I'm sweating really hard! ~ Evangeline Lilly

Hiraeth: a Welsh word that means a homesickness for a home you cannot return to, or maybe never was; it means nostalgia and yearning and grief for lost places. ~ Elizabeth Berg

Art has no obligation to evolve but it has a powerful incentive to do so. Art that is static, that captures a dead moment, is nothing. It is, at best, nostalgia; at worst, it can be a blight on our sense of who we are, a shame we pack away. Artists who refuse to listen, participate, and change along with the world around them are not being silenced or punished by censorious college sophomores, they are letting obsolescence devour them voluntarily. Political correctness is just the inexorable turn of the gear. Falling behind is preventable. ~ Lindy West

They told me,Heraclitus,they told me
you are dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear
and bitter tears to shed ...
I wept when i remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking,and sent him down the sky. ~ Callimachus

I eat fog for breakfast, and I shit out steamy love scenes from the 80s. ~ Jarod Kintz