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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  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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• 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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• 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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• 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

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• 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

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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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• Nothing is more often misdiagnosed than our homesickness for Heaven. We think that what we want is sex, drugs, alcohol, a new job, a raise, a doctorate, a spouse, a large-screen television, a new car, a cabin in the woods, a condo in Hawaii. What we really want is the person we were made for, Jesus, and the place we were made for, Heaven. Nothing less can satisfy us.

  Randy Alcorn

  Jesus, Jobs, Sex

  Randy Alcorn (2011). “Heaven”, p.160, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

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• 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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• 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

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• 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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• [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

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

  E. W. Howe

  Music, Piano, People

  25 Copy quote

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

  Ovid

  Soil, Forget, Sweetness

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• 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

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• Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly... perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness--the ache of the uprooted plant.

  Stephen King

  Beautiful, Real, Mind

  Stephen King (1994). “Different Seasons”, Signet Book

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• Homesickness is a great teacher. It taught me, during an endless rainy fall, that I came from the arid lands, and like where I came from. I was used to dry clarity and sharpness in the air. I was used to horizons that either lifted into jagged ranges or rimmed the geometrical circle of the flat world. I was used to seeing a long way. I was used to earth colors--tan, rusty red, toned white--and the endless green of Iowa offended me. I was used to a sun that came up over mountains and went down behind other mountains. I missed the color and smell of sagebrush, and the sight of bare ground.

  Wallace Stegner

  Teacher, Fall, Sight

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• Art is a means of memorialization of the past, a record of a rapidly vanishing world; a means of exorcising, at least temporarily, the ravages of homesickness. To speak of 'what is past, or passing or to come'-in the most meticulous language thereby to assure its permanence; to honor those we've loved and learned from and must outlive.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Mean, Past

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• The soul hardly ever realizes it, but whether he is a believer or not, his loneliness is really a homesickness for God.

  Hubert Van Zeller

  Inspirational, Life, Loneliness

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