Homesickness Quotes:

Homesickness for the gutter.

- Emile Augier

topic: Gutters, Homesickness

But to mourn, that's different. To mourn is to be eaten alive with homesickness for the person.

- Olive Ann Burns

source: Olive Ann Burns (2007). “Cold Sassy Tree”, p.56, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

topic: Different, Alive, Homesickness

I am tired of loving a foreign muse.

- Stephen Vincent Benet

topic: Tired, Muse, Homesickness

He decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.

- Thomas Pynchon

topic: Suffering, Born, Homesickness

Philosophy is really homesickness.

- George MacDonald

source: George MacDonald (1996). “A Dish of Orts”

topic: Philosophy, Homesickness

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

topic: Order, Missing, Beloved, Rockers, Cranberries

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

- Robert Frost

topic: Love, Life, Writing, Lovesickness, Lump In The Throat

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

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

topic: Missing Someone, Always Trying, Long, Prozac Nation, Prozac

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

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

topic: Travel, Homesick, Strange, Janus, Familiar Places

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

topic: Expression, Effort, Emotion, Great Poet, Lump In The Throat

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

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

topic: Childhood, Kind, Scene, Withstanding, Homesickness

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

- E. W. Howe

topic: Home, Men, Feelings, Homesickness

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

topic: Country, Long, People, Really Long, Homesickness

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

topic: Country, Home, Simple, Janus, Homesickness

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

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

topic: Jesus, Jobs, Sex, Cabin In The Woods, Doctorates

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

- Christos Tsiolkas

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

topic: Cities, Crowds, Aliens, Homesickness

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

- Ruth Pitter

topic: Heaven, Inns, Hotel, Homesickness, Right Road

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

- John Cheever

topic: Home, People, World, Homesickness

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

topic: Inspirational, Strong, Home, Comfort Of Home, Homesickness

[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

topic: Mother, Children, Home, Stunned, Freshman Year

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

- Maya Angelou

topic: Home, Truth Is, Homecoming, Leaving Home, Sweet Home

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

- E. W. Howe

topic: Music, Piano, People, Homesickness

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

- Ovid

topic: Soil, Forget, Sweetness, Homesickness

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

topic: Dream, Loneliness, Home, Vikings, Homesickness

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

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

topic: Beautiful, Real, Mind, Homesickness

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

topic: Teacher, Fall, Sight, Sharpness, Long Way

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

topic: Art, Mean, Past, Meticulous, Homesickness

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

topic: Inspirational, Loneliness, Soul, Homesickness

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

topic: Hurt, Eye, Differences, Homesickness, Skin And Bones

...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

topic: Morning, Soul, Desire, Homesickness

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

topic: Giving, Heaven, Desire, Homesickness

Our yearnings are homesicknesses for heaven; our sighings are for God, just as children that cry themselves asleep away from home, and sob in their slumber, know not that they sob for their parents. The soul's inarticulate moanings are the affections yearning for the Infinite, and having no one to tell them what it is that ails them.

- Henry Ward Beecher

source: Henry Ward Beecher (1860). “Life thoughts”, p.67

topic: Children, Home, Parent, Inarticulate, Homesickness

It is with a rush of home-sickness that the thought of death presents itself.... Such sentiment is the eternal stock of all religions, modified indeed by changes of time and place, but indestructible, because its root is so deep in the earth of man's nature. The breath of religious initiators passes over them; a few "rise up with wings as eagles" [Isaiah 40:31], but the broad level of religious life is not permanently changed. Religious progress, like all purely spiritual progress, is confined to a few.

- Walter Pater

topic: Death, Spiritual, Religious, Indestructible, Religious Life

My soul comes from better worlds and I have an incurable homesickness of the stars.

- Nikos Kazantzakis

topic: Stars, Soul, World, Homesickness

Christian fasting, at its root, is the hunger of a homesickness for God

- John Piper

topic: Christian, Roots, Fasting, Homesickness

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

topic: God, Baby, Flower, Homesickness

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

topic: Summer, Kings, Wall, City Walls, Far Side

It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement

- Jacques Derrida

topic: Desire, Return, Archives, Homesickness, Irrepressible

We have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.

- Hermann Hesse

source: Hermann Hesse (1963). “Steppenwolf: novel”, Harcourt School

topic: Home, Dirt, Guides, Humbug, Homesickness

Some people speak and sing and walk and sit and sleep and silence their homesickness, for a long time, and to no avail. Some say that over time homesickness loses its specific content, that it starts to smolder and only then becomes all-consuming, because it’s no longer focused on a concrete home. I am one of the people who say that.

- Herta Muller

topic: Home, Sleep, Long, Homesickness

Not if Their Party were waiting, Not if to talk with Me Were to Them now, Homesickness After Eternity.

- Emily Dickinson

source: Emily Dickinson (1998). “The Poems of Emily Dickinson”, p.662, Harvard University Press

topic: Party, Waiting, Eternity, Homesickness

[When thinking about the new relativity and quantum theories] I have felt a homesickness for the paths of physical science where there are ore or less discernible handrails to keep us from the worst morasses of foolishness.

- Arthur Eddington

topic: Science, Thinking, Path, Quantum Theory, Homesickness

When the word 'nostalgia' was coined in the 18th century, it was used to describe a pathology - not so much a sense of lost time, but a severe homesickness.

- Nicole Krauss

source: "Have a heart". Interview With Gaby Wood, www.theguardian.com. May 14, 2005.

topic: Nostalgia, Used, Lost, Homesickness

I kind of like to look at the ranch on Google, reminds me of where I want to be sometimes.

- George W. Bush

source: Interview with Maria Bartiromo, www.nbcnews.com. September 23, 2006.

topic: Google, Looks, Want, Homesickness

In the midst of the happiness they brought there was always a lurking shadow. The shadow of incompatibility; of the impossibility of being at once bound and free. The garden breeds a longing for the wild; the wild a homesickness for the garden.

- Dorothy Richardson

source: Dorothy Miller Richardson (1925). “The Trap”

topic: Garden, Shadow, Longing, Incompatibility, Homesickness

Man, full of emptiness and torn apart with homesickness for the desert has had to create from within himself an adventure, a torture-chamber, an unsafe and hazardous wilderness- this fool, this prisoner consumed with longing and despair, became the inventor of 'bad conscience'.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

source: Friedrich Nietzsche (2006). “Nietzsche: 'On the Genealogy of Morality' and Other Writings Student Edition”, p.57, Cambridge University Press

topic: Adventure, Men, Despair, Homesickness, Torn Apart

If they don't board and live by themselves, even in their second year they've got no lounge or kitchen table and it's a pretty lonely existence when you get home to an empty house. Homesickness is a key issue for kids who are drafted interstate, whether they are going to Melbourne or coming to Perth or going to Brisbane. All the kids we've drafted this year will all go through periods of homesickness, which can lead to worse things.

- Trevor Nisbett

topic: Lonely, Home, Kids, Interstate, Perth

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

topic: World, Association, Cry, Ineffable, Homesickness

I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?

- David Foster Wallace

source: David Foster Wallace (2004). “The Broom of the System: A Novel”, p.71, Penguin

topic: Home, Thinking, Missing, Homesickness

Her blog was doing well, with thousands of unique visitors each month, and she was earning good speaking fees, and she had a fellowship at Princeton and a relationship with Blaine - "You are the absolute love of my life," he'd written in her last birthday card - and yet 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

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

topic: Morning, Unique, Love Of My Life, Each Month, Absolute Love

The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.

- Joan Didion

topic: Home, Writing, Trying, Homesickness

He shifted over without comment, lifting the blankets, and I scrambled into the warm sheets beside him. He smelled like soap and sleep and bare skin. He smelled familiar. Not the deja vu familiar of Guy or Mel. Familiar like...the ache in your chest of homesickness, of longing for harbor after weeks of rough seas or craving a fire's warmth after snow--or wanting back something you should never have given away.

- Josh Lanyon

topic: Sleep, Sea, Fire, Deja Vu, Bare Skin