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

“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

“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

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

“Home sickness comes in waves, sometimes leaving me reeling.”
― Nina Mingya Powles, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai

“We cannot intervene in the rotation of the earth," said Delaura.
"But we could be unaware of it so that it does not cause us grief," said the Bishop.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Of Love and Other Demons

“… so delicate, but potent. It makes us a bit more human--is that ache in your heart for a place [or someone] that no longer exists... a sneaky magician. One that takes us by surprise in the most lucid way possible.”
― Efrat Cybulkiewicz

“But the thing was - those books were what made my days bearable. They were what helped me sleep at night without my homesickness choking me. Without books, what was there to look forward to?”
― Aisha Saeed, Amal Unbound

“I was
brutal in

My Ithika
thinking”
― Sundin Richards, The Hurricane Lamp

“— Como estamos longe! — suspirou. De quê? — De nós mesmos — disse o bispo. — Achas justo que alguém precise de um ano para saber que é
órfão? — E, à falta de resposta, desabafou a sua saudade: — Fico aterrorizado só à ideia de saber que na Espanha já tenham dormido esta noite.
— Não podemos interferir na rotação da Terra — disse Delaura.
— Mas poderíamos ignorá-la, para que não nos doa — disse o bispo.
— Mais que fé, o que faltava a Galileu era coração.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Of Love and Other Demons

“I had never seen this type of clock, carved from hardwood into the shape of our homeland (...) Some craftsman in exile had understood that this was exactly the timepiece his countrymen desired. We were displaced persons, but it was time more than space that defined us. While the distance to return to our lost country was far but finite, the number of years it would take to close that distance was potentially infinite. Thus, for displaced people, the first question was always about time: When can I return?

Refugee, exile, immigrant — whatever species of displaced human we were, we did not simply live in two cultures, as celebrants of the great American melting pot imagined. Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time-travelers. But while science fiction imagined time-travelers as moving forwards and backwards in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, a bleakness and borderlessness. It brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness. She scoured Nigerian websites, Nigerian pro files on Facebook, Nigerian blogs, and each click brought yet another story of a young person who had recently moved back home, clothed in American or British degrees, to start an investment company, a music production business, a fashion label, a magazine, a fast-food franchise She looked at photographs of these men and women and felt the dull ache of loss, as though they had prised open her hand and taken some thing of hers. They were living her life.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“jeg skjønner hjemlengsel
det får jeg ofte
jeg lengter
fort hjem
men hvorfor
lengter jeg ikke
ut der til alle de andre
har jeg ikke demlengsel?”
― Kristian Bergquist, Jeg klarer det ikke alene

“You’re a relief not to come home to.
And now I'm free to come home.”
― Benny Woith, vast.

“Quanti milioni di esiliati, scacciati e profughi c'erano stati nei millenni della storia umana? E la caratteristica principale della loro tragedia non era forse il permanente legame con la comunità dalla quale erano stati o si erano strappati?
Questa comunità era come un'amata perduta. Dolore, rabbia, gelosia, melanconia, disperazione, ansia di lottare, sete di dimostrare la propria insostituibilità, perfino un bisogno di vendetta che giunge all'annientamento si susseguono nel rapporto con l'amata perduta, con la quale, nell'esilio, si convive in maniera più intima, più appassionata e più incessante che mai. E il sentimento più profondo di tutti è la nostalgia, la divorante nostalgia del ritrovamento e della riconquista.”
― Johannes Urzidil, L'amata perduta