You know, nostalgia is denial. Denial of the painful present.

After so many years, it's become like a pool of memories to me, never knowing if those memories are real, or if they're simply what I want to remember.

I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.

Childhood. That's nostalgia and a trap.

There was a time I knew everything in the sky. Every satellite. Every constellation. Souvenirs of space walks and astronauts. And rockets launched by NASA in the '60s. As a kid, I looked up and felt the future. It belonged to me.

Nothing comforts anxiety like a little nostalgia.

I have to tell you something. I still know which stars are ours.

I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to «I hate to read new books,» and I hollered «Comrade!» to whoever owned it before me.