On nostalgia

Sentimentality is about lies, he says, nostalgia about "real things gone," not so much about what we remember, but itself "an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanence of loss." The body cannot remember a lie. 

[...] I used to believe that my nostalgia was so intense because I felt I had lost something I never possessed. But the truth is that we do not possess our lives. As true exiles know, we stand too easily to lose them, and in the end we are all just passing through. It is what we remember of the journey that we possess. 

- Lee Zacharias, "Mud Pies"