Homesickness Quotes

“Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.”
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

“Give me the waters of Lethe that numb the heart, if they exist, I will still not have the power to forget you.”
― Publius Ovidius Naso, The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters

“It's a kindness that the mind can go where it wishes.”
― Publius Ovidius Naso, The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters

“He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“I felt a pang -- a strange and inexplicable pang that I had never felt before.
It was homesickness.
Now, even more than I had earlier when I'd first glimpsed it, I longed to be transported into that quiet little landscape, to walk up the path, to take a key from my pocket and open the cottage door, to sit down by the fireplace, to wrap my arms around myself, and to stay there forever and ever.”
― Alan Bradley, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

“Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It'll be spring soon. And the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they'll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields... and eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“He decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“Perhaps the ache of homesickness was a fair price to pay for having so many good people in her life.”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“The window opened in the same direction as the king's, and there, summer-bright and framed by the darkness of the stairwell, was the same view. Costis passed it, and then went back up the stairs to look again. There were only the roofs of the lower part of the palace and the town and the city walls. Beyond those were the hills on the far side of the Tustis Valley and the faded blue sky above them. It wasn't what the king saw that was important, it was what he couldn't see when he sat at the window with his face turned toward Eddis.”
― Megan Whalen Turner, The King of Attolia

“Oh, London is a man's town, there's power in the air;
And Paris is a woman's town, with flowers in her hair;
And it's sweet to dream in Venice, and it's great to study Rome;
But when it comes to living there is no place like home.”
― Henry Van Dyke

“Every mile was redolent of associations, which she would not have missed for the world, but each of which made her cry upon 'the days that are no more' with ineffable longing.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“Heart thoughts are profound, hindsight aches and hope is obscure. I'm craving a great adventure -- one that leads me back home.”
― Donna Lynn Hope

“Our native soil draws all of us, by I know not what sweetness, and never allows us to forget.”
― Publius Ovidius Naso, The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters

“When you get homesick, it's not something missing, it's something present, a visit. People and places from far away arrive and keep you company for a while.”
― Erri De Luca, God's Mountain

“My father says you remember the smell of your country no matter where you are but only recognize it when you're far away.”
― Aglaja Veteranyi, Warum das Kind in der Polenta kocht

“Never complete. Never whole.
White skin and an African soul.”
― Michelle Frost

“Sometimes John had recorded new compositions, or lines from his new poems. Sometimes he'd just record a busy night in The Green Man. Sometimes sheep, seals, skylarks, the wind turbine. If Liam were home there would be some Liam. The summer fair. The Fastnet Race. I would unfold my map of Clear Island. Those tapes prised the lid off homesickness and rattled out the contents, but always at the bottom was solace.”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

“But there’s something about Watonka, they say. Something that pulls us back, the electromagnet that holds all the metal in place. It’s the food, they say, or the chicken wings or the sports teams or the people or the way the air over the Skyway smells like Cheerios on account of the old General Mills Plant.”
― Sarah Ockler, Bittersweet

“And finally: I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an ecological niche:
...Beneath the sky
Of my America to sigh
For one locality in Russia.

(a passage not for 'general readers' but for 'idiots')”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“That’s one of the damnedest things I ever found out about human emotions and how treacherous they can be - the fact that you can hate a place with all your heart and soul and still be homesick for it. Not to speak of the fact that you can hate a person with all your heart and soul and still long for that person.”
― Joseph Mitchell, Joe Gould's Secret

“Few things are more important than finding a home and working at it constantly to make it resonate with deep memories and fulfill deep longings.”
― Thomas Moore

“So musste es jeden Morgen zuerst lange hin und her schauen, bis es sich wieder besinnen konnte, wo es war, und jedes Mal fühlte es etwas auf seinem Herzen liegen, das es würgte und drückte, wenn es sah, dass es nicht daheim sei auf der Alp. (S. 248)”
― Johanne Spyri, Heidi

“I used to think, in Belaire, that maybe you had gone to live with the List, and it hadn't suited you, and that one spring they'd bring you home dead. From homesickness. I saw how you would look, pale and sad."

"I did die," she said. "It was easy.”
― John Crowley, Engine Summer

“She and her brother, harvesting those long, tall flowers, some almost as tall as they were. She bit into a husk. Her nostrils filled with a hay-like scent that seemed to linger on her fingers. Even now, she knew the familiar fragrance…”
― Suzy Davies, The Nightingale and The Sunflower

“Monkstown Hospital by Stewart Stafford

My first time away from Mam,
Tonsillectomy at six years old,
Teddy bear fights Action Man,
Pinball Pocketeer for company.

Silver torch lights the dark hours,
A miniscule pack of playing cards,
A made-up game played undercover,
My best guess of what picture follows.

An older man awaits surgery too,
Seeing that I'm alone and scared,
He draws pictures to amuse me or,
We watch "funnies" in the TV room.

Waking from the operation in the bed,
Congealed blood covers my pyjamas,
My mother makes her shock known,
We go home for my First Communion.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Uviđam kako mi fali dom, neka baza, krov i četiri zida među kojima ću živjeti i raditi pa onda od tamo putovati. Imati se kamo vratiti. Kad nekamo odem, znati što ću raditi tamo kamo sam otišao. I znati što ću raditi kad se vratim doma, ma gdje taj dom bio.”
― Bekim Sejranović, Dnevnik jednog nomada

“It was like taking a hammer to the home I had built in the Arabic language word by word, over many years in Sudan and Saudi Arabia. My increasing strength in English correlated negatively with my Arabic. The more I felt at home in English, the less Arabic felt like one. So much so that learning a new language was to acquire a new wound. Multilingualism meant multi-wounding.”
― Sulaiman Addonia

“Do you miss Mallow Island?

That had always been a complicated question to answer because of how closely it was tied to his mother. He didn't miss her. But he missed Frasier. He missed the way sugar seemed to float out of every open door on Trade Street. He missed trying to find fiddler crabs with a flashlight on summer nights. He missed being able to drive around without GPS because he knew every road by heart. He missed the good things. He thought the job at the Rondo would give him a taste of himself again, but he knew now that he was never going to find himself here.
He'd left too much of himself behind.
And now he just wanted to go home.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Other Birds

“I realized that a new phase of exile was beginning, that from now on there would be other periods, all different, each with its own anxieties, all shattering and overwhelming, and that I would be changing too, passing from one crisis to the next until I reached the moment of truth, unique and definitive — the day on which I would either stop being an exile and return home, or unavoidably, with sadness and resignation, become an immigrant.”
― Fernando Alegria

“when shall I cease to regret you!—when learn to feel a home elsewhere!—Oh! happy house, could you know what I suffer in now viewing you from this spot, from whence perhaps I may view you no more!—And you, ye well-known trees!—but you will continue the same.—No leaf will decay because we are removed, nor any branch become motionless although we can observe you no longer!—No; you will continue the same; unconscious of the pleasure or the regret you occasion, and insensible of any change in those who walk under your shade!—But who will remain to enjoy you?”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility