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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“No, she felt homesick, not for a place, but for a time. Maybe it wasn't homesickness at all. Maybe it was timesickness. She just missed those days when she was younger - seven, six, five, four years old - when she didn't know so much about the world. She missed, most of all, her mother.”
― Matt Haig, The Girl Who Saved Christmas

“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

“How phenomenal we, humans, are – the further we are from our beloved home, the stronger our connection becomes…”
― Tamuna Tsertsvadze, Galaxy Pirates

“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

“Homesickness was an adjustment disorder, that was the long and short of it.”
― Aminatta Forna, Happiness

“It is strange and cold. I can feel it through the box" said Miss Flower and she cried, "No one will understand us or know what we want. Oh no one will understand us again!"
But Miss Happiness was more hopeful and more brave. "I think they will,"she said.
"How will they?"
"Because there will be some little girl who is clever and kind."
"Will there be?" said Miss Flower longingly.
"Yes."
"Why will there be?"
"Because there always has been," said Miss Happiness.”
― Rumer Godden, Miss Happiness and Miss Flower

“Homesickness is a sickness of the heart, not of the mind. It is deeply subjective and belongs, inarguably, to the sufferer alone.”
― Kate Mulgrew, How to Forget: A Daughter's Memoir

“It struck her that he might have told no one, not even his brothers, how he felt, and she thought how lonely that might have been for him.”
― Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn

“I always wanted to travel, but now that I am, all I want is to go home”
― Rehan Khan, A Tudor Turk

“And I was upset to find how really reluctant I was to leave my little flat. It was as if I was almost frightened. Spasms of prophetic homesickness pierced me as I rearranged the china and dusted it with my handkerchief, obsessive visions of burglaries and desecrations.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Do you miss home? Awa asked. “Home is where you find comfort” John replied.”
― Rehan Khan, A Tudor Turk

“¿Quién soy después de este éxodo? Tengo una roca
a mi nombre sobre las llanuras que se asoma al pasado

مَنْ أَنا بَعْدَ هذا ٱلرَّحيلِ ٱلْجَماعِيِّ؟ لي صَخْرَةٌ
تَحْمِلُ ٱسْمِيَ فَوْقَ هِضابٍ تُطلُّ على ما مَضَى”
― Mahmoud Darwish, أحد عشر كوكبا

“New York was home for Czerny, the same way Chicago was home for me. You don’t really know how attached you are until you move away, until you’ve experienced what it means to be dislodged, a cork floating on the ocean of another place.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“I have been wandering for long. I have been drifting for long. Missing home!”
― Avijeet Das

“Not all of us have that luxury, of a past. My history doesn't offer me much in that respect.”
― Helon Habila, Travelers