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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

“He loved mountains, or he had loved the thought of them marching on the edges of stories brought from far away; but now he was borne down by the insupportable weight of Middle-earth. He longed to shut out the immensity in a quiet room by a fire.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“I went north, east and west
but the south was far and impenetrable to me
because the south is my home
So I became a metaphor of a swallow soaring above my debris”
― Mahmoud Darwish, جدارية

“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

“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

“Your true Home is not a place but a state of being.”
― Suzanne Giesemann, The Awakened Way: Making the Shift to a Divinely Guided Life

“For him, England has always been a land of fairy tales: a world of pictures, of black-and-white sketches depicting pale, chubby children eating currant buns. A land of fairies and witches, hedgerows and secret gardens, goblins and magical woods. When he arrived he was surprised to find it looked almost exactly as it did in the stories. The trees, the meadows, the little brick houses. He had not come to a real country, but a story come to life. Every day, then, he woke to a fantasy. And no matter how solid and cold and uncomfortable it was, he could never feel it was a country as such, could never quite believe that it had been formed from the same molten stuff that had made his birthplace. England was always secondary, always derivative, always an aftereffect of a story. Perhaps this is why, now, he can decide to leave it.”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Other Side of the World