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

  Order, Missing, Homesick

  Jodi Picoult (2009). “Handle with Care: A Novel”, p.452, Simon and Schuster

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• A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

  Robert Frost

  Love, Life, Writing

  Robert Frost, Lawrance Roger Thompson (1964). “Selected letters”

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• homesickness is just a state of mind for me. i'm always missing someone or someplace or something, i'm always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. my life has been one long longing.

  Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Missing Someone, Always Trying, Long

  Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.82, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

  Robert Frost

  Expression, Effort, Emotion

  Robert Frost, Mark Richardson (2007). “The Collected Prose of Robert Frost”, p.84, Harvard University Press

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  We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

  Carson McCullers

  Travel, Jukebox, Road Trip

  Carson McCullers (2017). “Carson McCullers: Stories, Plays & Other Writings”, p.408, Library of America

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• The worst feeling in the world is the homesickness that comes over a man occasionally when he is at home.

  E. W. Howe

  Home, Men, Feelings

  7 Copy quote

• Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Childhood, Kind, Scene

  "On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates". Book by Soren Kierkegaard, 1841.

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• It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

  Carson McCullers

  Country, Home, Simple

  Carson McCullers (1975). “The mortgaged heart”, Penguin Books Ltd

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  We are homesick most for the places we have never known.

  Carson McCullers

  Jukebox, Homesick, Nostalgia

  Carson McCullers (2017). “Carson McCullers: Stories, Plays & Other Writings”, p.408, Library of America

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• One's homesickness for Heaven finds at least an inn there; and it's an inn on the right road.

  Ruth Pitter

  Heaven, Homesick, Inns

  6 Copy quote

• Homesickness is . . . absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. . . . You don't really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don't have, or haven't been able to find.

  John Cheever

  Country, Time, Long

  33 Copy quote

• Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

  John Cheever

  Home, People, World

  "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow". Book by John Cheever, "The Bella Lingua", 1964.

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• Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one.

  Charles Dickens

  Strong, Home, Names

  Charles Dickens, John Forster (1868). “The Works of Charles Dickens ...: Martin Chugglewit”, p.160

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• You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right.

  Maya Angelou

  Home, Truth Is, Cozy Home

  Maya Angelou, Jeffrey M. Elliot (1989). “Conversations with Maya Angelou”

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• [After my mother died, I had a feeling that was] not unlike the homesickness that always filled me for the first few days when I went to stay at my grandparents'' house, and even, I was stunned to discover, during the first few months of my freshman year at college. It was not really the home my mother had made that I yearned for. But I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life.

  Anna Quindlen

  Mother, Children, Home

  13 Copy quote

• When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will have.

  E. W. Howe

  Music, Piano, People

  24 Copy quote

• Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.

  Charles Dickens

  Inspirational, Strong, Home

  "Martin Chuzzlewit". Book by Charles Dickens, Chapter 35, 1844.

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• Our native soil draws all of us, by I know not what sweetness, and never allows us to forget.

  Ovid

  Soil, Forget, Sweetness

  5 Copy quote

• You travel life has the aspect of a dream. It is something outside the normal, yet you are in it. It is peopled with characters you have never seen before and in all probability will never see again. It brings occasional homesickness, and loneliness, and pangs of longing ... But you are like the Vikings who have gone into a world of adventure, and home is not home until you return.

  Agatha Christie

  Dream, Loneliness, Home

  6 Copy quote

• ...there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  Morning, Soul, Desire

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013). “Americanah”, p.12, Anchor

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• We need to be homesick for heaven. Though we have never been there, we still have something God has built within us that gives us a certain homesickness, a desire to be there.

  Greg Laurie

  Giving, Heaven, Desire

  16 Copy quote

• There is in all our strivings a profound homesickness for God. When we touch another we touch God. When we look at a flower, its radiance, its fragrance, its stillness is another moment's experience of something deeper within. When we hold a baby, when we hear extraordinary music, when we look into the eyes of a great saint, what draws us is that deep homesickness for our true nature, for the peace and healing that is our birthright. This homesickness for God directs us toward the healing we took birth for.

  Stephen Levine

  God, Baby, Flower

  22 Copy quote

• I'm always telling myself I don't have many feelings. Even when something does affect me I'm only moderately moved. I almost never cry. It's not that I'm stronger than the ones with teary eyes, I'm weaker. They have courage. When all you are is skin and bones, feelings are a brave thing. I'm more of a coward. The difference is minimal though, I just use my strength not to cry. When I do allow myself a feeling, I take the part that hurts and bandage it up with a story that doesn't cry, that doesn't dwell on homesickness.

  Herta Muller

  Hurt, Eye, Differences

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• 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

  Summer, Kings, Wall

  8 Copy quote

• Homesickness hits hardest in the middle of a crowd in a large, alien city.

  Christos Tsiolkas

  Cities, Crowds, Aliens

  Christos Tsiolkas (2014). “Barracuda”, p.24, Atlantic Books Ltd

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