Homesick Quotes

“Everybody that went away suffered a broken heart." I'm coming back some day, "they all wrote. But never did. The old life was too small to fit anymore.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“My stepfather, John O'Hara, was the goodest man there was. He was not a man of many words, but of carefully chosen ones. He was the one parent who didn't try to fix me. One night I sat on his lap in his chair by the woodstove, sobbing. He just held me quietly and then asked only," What does it feel like? "It was the first time I was prompted to articulate it. I thought about it, then said," I feel homesick. "That still feels like the most accurate description - I felt homesick, but I was home.”
― Sarah Silverman, The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee

“I am homesick for a place I am not sure even exists. One where my heart is full. My body loved. And my soul understood.”
― Melissa Cox

“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

“You know, I tried not to think of this place. I tried to let it go. To leave it behind. But it always came back to me, in my dreams. I'd dream about these details, these objects and people and places I'd left behind, and I'd wake up crying.”
― Danzy Senna

“She was right. The purebred girls were making mistakes on purpose, in order to give us an advantage. 'King me,' I growled, out of turn. 'I say king me!' and Felicity meekly complied. Beulah pretended not to mind when we got frustrated with the oblique, fussy movement from square to square and shredded the board to ribbons. I felt sorry for them. I wondered what it would be like to be bred in captivity, and always homesick for a dimly sensed forest, the trees you've never seen.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“And no matter where I went, I’d never get home. Because home was a ship that was at the bottom of the sea, where my mother’s bones lay sleeping.”
― Adrienne Young, Fable

“I know that I am—all that I am.
And all that I am
is full and ripe.

All that I am is standing still,
waiting and watching
and bursting with life.

Holding the straining seams of my skin,
my passion and wit
and my sanity in.

Waiting for someone
to soothe and to say
“I understand. You’re home.”
― Julie Andrews Edwards, Home Work: A Memoir of My Hollywood Years

“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

“I’d heard of homesickness, but I hadn’t known that one could experience it prior to actually leaving a place.”
― Daniel Thorman, Chaos in the Caravan

“Only then did I allow myself to think of home: my little rooms, neat and bright with jars and vials; the moths that danced round my candles at night. And outside, my garden. My heart ached at the thought of my plants and flowers, my dear nanny goat who kept me in milk and comfort, the sycamore that sheltered me with its boughs.”
― Emilia Hart, Weyward

“Nostalgia is an excessive sentimentality for the past, for home. It is associated with a yearning to return to a happy and safe period in your life. The word comes from nóstos, meaning “homecoming”, and álgos, meaning “pain” or “ache”. It’s all about the “good old days”, and “the good times”. Conservatism revolves around nostalgia. All right wingers are nostalgic, and suffer from future shock and future fear. Science is about extreme nostalgia for the material atoms of the ancient Greeks. Materialism is entirely dead in the era of quantum mechanics, yet scientists go on believing in matter anyway. They are highly conservative individuals unwilling to contemplate leaving the home materialism has provided for them. The last thing they want is to end up in the Unknown Land of Mind, where thought, not matter, is core reality. That would ruin everything for the scientific materialists and empiricists.”
― Thomas Stark, Extra Scientiam Nulla Salus: How Science Undermines Reason

“The air smells green and secret, surprising Beatrice with a rare pang of homesickness for Crow County; she supposes a person doesn't have to love their home in order to miss it.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Once and Future Witches

“Even as I began to drift off, I was left with a sense of isolation. Surrounded by noise but alone. I was in a place with a thousand species, but I felt more lonely than I ever had exploring the caverns at home.
- Spensa; Starsight; Brandon Sanderson Skyward Series”
― Brandon Sanderson, Starsight

“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

“Yet in my heart I was bereft, grieving – homesick for a place I had never seen. For a place that doesn't exist, yet I belonged there nonetheless. Ridiculous really. Ridiculous, yet so acute and abiding.”
― Claire-Louise Bennett, Checkout 19

“I realised how terrible it must be to be at home everywhere for it means to be at home nowhere!”
― Ryan Gelpke, Peruvian Nights

“How strange it is to be a continent away from ¨home¨ and you don't know where ¨home¨ is anyhow and all the ¨home¨ you've got is in your head.

[letter to Neal Cassady, Jan. 8, 1951]”
― Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac Selected Letters 1940-1956

“The overblown woman swept out in a waft of attar of roses and Della stood relishing the patch of frail sunlight, imagining herself down by the creek feeding Tidda a handful of sweetgrass while she listened to the Darkinjung women tell their stories.”
― Tea Cooper, The Woman in the Green Dress

“Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
And trees and hills they long have known”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

“I'm homesick for the eighties," I once told a neighbor.”
― T.L. Russell

“A home adds chapters”
― Nanette L. Avery

“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

“Opening the window, I sit at Taryn's desk and sip nettle tea, drinking in the sharp salt scent of the sea and the wild honeysuckle and the distant breeze through the trees. I take a deep breath, at home and homesick all at the same time.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“Home is a people, not a place.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Her Insan Ailem: Everyone is Family, Everywhere is Home

“As she stepped through the front door onto the verandah, a warm breeze brushed her face and she felt a heavy wave of deep familiarity: the smell of eucalyptus and sunbaked dirt, the light so bright it put creases around her eyes just to look at it. The slender blue gums on the ridge, ancient and watchful. This was the landscape of her childhood and she would never be able to escape its influence.
But just as Daniel Miller had brought her to Halcyon, the books that she'd read as a child, lying beneath the ferns at Darling House, had taken her to lands where trees with names like oak and chestnut and elm grew in great, ancient forests, and the soil was moist and the sun was gentle, where there were magical words like "hedgerow" and "conker," and snow kissed the glass of windows in winter, and children went sledding at Christmas and ate "pudding" and "blancmange." And so, she had come to know another landscape, not just intellectually, but viscerally: a landscape of the imagination as real to her as the geographical landscape in which she moved. When she first arrived in England as a twenty-year-old graduate, she had stepped off the plane and known it already.
Standing here now, looking across the valley toward the facing hill, Jess could imagine how homesick Isabel must have felt at times. She herself had been thinking about "home" a lot. Home, she'd realized, wasn't a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of "home" wasn't "away", it was "lonely." When someone said, "I want to go home," what they really meant was that they didn't want to feel lonely anymore.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“Der sker noget magisk, når mama fortæller om sin ungdom i Syrien. I et øjeblik forsvinder trætheden omkring hendes øjne.
Tiden forbarmer sig over hendes ansigt, og jeg får et glimt af den unge kvinde, hun var engang. Før Danmark. Før mig.
Der kommer en svag rødmen i hendes kinder, der i et kort øjeblik dækker over det, jeg ikke kan snakke om. Selv hendes stemme får en livligere klang, og hun taler, som om intet er galt.
Jeg kan godt blive misundelig over, at hendes bedste dage var, før jeg blev født, men jeg har accepteret, at hjemve er en ufattelig hård konkurrent.
Eftersom hun ser mig hver dag, vil jeg aldrig kunne vinde.
Hun vil altid savne Syrien mere, end hun elsker mig.”
― Sara Rahmeh, Betonhjerter

“I find myself homesick for a place I do not know, but somehow have not forgotten.”
― Stacie Martin

“i am homesick
for a home that
i have yet to create”
― Christopher Tapp, May I Come Home