Leaving Home Quotes

“It is always sad when someone leaves home, unless they are simply going around the corner and will return in a few minutes with ice-cream sandwiches.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them.”
― Andy Bernard

“When you leave home to follow your dreams, your road will probably be riddled with potholes, not always paved in happy Technicolor bricks. You'll probably be kicked to the ground 150 million times and told you're nuts by friends and strangers alike. As you progress you may feel lonely or terrified for your physical and emotional safety. You may overestimate your own capabilities or fail to live up to them, and you'll surely fall flat on your face once in a while.”
― Kelly Cutrone, If You Have to Cry, Go Outside: And Other Things Your Mother Never Told You

“Oh, why did people have to be seperated before they understood how much they meant to each other?”
― Linda Crew, Children of the River

“The city was lovely. There could be no place in the world to which he belonged so completely.
That was why he'd always dreamed of leaving, and why he'd always been so afraid to go.”
― Daniel Alarcón, At Night We Walk in Circles

“Their progeny has blossomed into adulthood
they’ve left the haven of the nest
bound to their mates
busy crafting a new abode afar.”
― Sanu Sharma

“He thought about their anthem, You’ll Never Walk Alone, and felt worse.”
― J.L. Marrain, THE GRIDD: PERILS OF THE LIGHTHOLDER

“Ah college years, those were the days. Pure freedom ... leaving home for the first time…the parties…”
"What about the tutorials, the lectures, the large building with all the books called the ‘library’?”
“Is that what those were?” Gerry blithely replied.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“It was a time before Facebook and Instagram and texting. I imagine it must be easier now, for college students. Home must not feel so far away anymore. But how do you cut the apron strings if the strings are virtual?”
― Kirstie Collins Brote, Beware of Love in Technicolor

“Home was truly the best place he could possibly be, but, alas, was not an available option.”
― Kenneth Eade, Unreasonable Force

“Maybe I should go home. I miss Bombay. But the Bombay I miss isn't there to go home to anymore. This is who we are. We sail away from the place we love and then because we aren't there to love it people go with axes and burning torches and smash and burn and then we say, Oh, too sad. But we abandoned it, left it to our barbarian successors to destroy.”
― Salman Rushdie, Quichotte

“I regarded home as a place I left behind in order to come back to it afterward.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“If I'm honest, though, it's in these moments- with the music filling the car and the wind whipping past the windows, the late-afternoon sun flashing gold through the trees and my family close behind me-that I feel... lucky, Really, truly lucky, despite all the moving and leaving and adjusting. Despite everything.
- Eliza Lin”
― Ann Liang, This Time It's Real

“Thomas Wolfe warned in the title of America's great novel that "you can't go home again." I enjoyed the book but I never agreed with the title. I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one's skin, at the extreme corners of one's eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.”
― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

“This whole 'leaving' thing? It's in me.”
― Maeve Higgins, Maeve in America: Essays by a Girl from Somewhere Else

“The trail will only provide if you accept its offer. All of it. You must leave home. You must be broken. It will cost you your entire life as you know it. And then, and only then, can you receive. What you receive will be far greater than anything you had or anything you lost. It will change you. It might even heal you.”
― Ben Crawford, 2,000 Miles Together: The Story of the Largest Family to Hike the Appalachian Trail

“Everything that loomed so large close up - all you had to do was step away, and they shrank to nothing. You could stop taking their phone calls, tear up their letters, pretend they'd never existed. Start over as a new person with a new life. Just a problem of geography, he thought, with the confidence of someone who had never yet tried to free himself of family.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“Whether moving out of state or to a completely different country, moving away from home takes bravery and even more emotional preparation than practical planning – especially if dealing with unsupportive loved ones.”
― Brooke Baum, Moving Away: The Emotional Side of Leaving

“The trail will only provide if you accept its offer. All of it. You must leave home. You must be broken. It will cost you your entire life as you know it. And then, and only then, can you receive”
― Ben Crawford, 2,000 Miles Together: The Story of the Largest Family to Hike the Appalachian Trail

“They had reached the top of a hill. Drogo turned back to look at the city against the light. Plumes of smoke were rising from roofs. He saw his own house in the distance. He identified the window of his room. It was probably open; the women were tidying up. They would strip the bed, put things away in the closet, then bolt the shutters. For months and months no one would enter, except for the patient dust and on sunny days faint streaks of light. There, shut up in darkness, would lie the little world of his boyhood. His mother would preserve it so that on his return he would find everything the same, enabling him to remain a boy in that room, even after his long absence. She was no doubt deluding herself; she believed she could preserve intact a happiness that had vanished forever, holding back the flight of time, so that when doors and windows were reopened at her son's return, things would revert to the way they were before.”
― Dino Buzzati, Il deserto dei Tartari

“To leave home. It’s gotta be worth leaving.”
― Brad Pitt

“Instead of moving on, it felt like everything behind me was being wiped out, as though I had conjured it into being and when I wasn't looking it all disappeared.”
― Ciara Smyth, The Falling in Love Montage

“You can see so much of the world through others' memories, places you've never been, faces you've never seen and never will, weather you've never felt and food you've never tasted, that sometimes it's hard not to want to just feel, taste, see those familiar things over and over. Truly new things become alien, other, not to be trusted. There are those who know their village so well, through the eyes and hearts of so many before them, that they can't leave it to go somewhere else, they can't bear to place their feet on a path that they have never trodden, on soil they have never planted with a thousand seeds in some past life as lover or child. Some become unable to leave their lodge or tent, or can't sail past the sight of familiar cliffs.”
― Nicola Griffith, Ammonite

“But when I left, I figured something out real quick: It's not the whole world. Just because everyone here knows who you are, and everyone talks about everyone else's business, that doesn't mean it's impossible to be the person you know you are. There are things out there for you that you haven't even thought of yet, that you don't even know how to think of yet. Who you are here doesn't have to be the same as who you are out there. And if the person you feel like you have to be in this town doesn't feel right to you, you're allowed to leave. You're allowed to exist. Even if it means existing somewhere else.”
― Casey McQuiston, I Kissed Shara Wheeler

“Six months after Lucien traveled to Australia, Mum left her son, her parents, her brothers and sisters, her work, her friends and her country, sailed over the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, through the Suez Canal, across the Indian Ocean, into the Pacific and joined her husband in Sydney to start a new life. That's the sort of thing people did back then. Everyone was starting again after the war, after losing mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, children, husbands and wives. It seems shocking now, but there wasn't such a sentimental attitude towards family or such a fear of death then as we have now. (People who live through wars often develop attachment disorders as protection from loss.)”
― Viv Albertine, To Throw Away Unopened

“..high resolution and a faith equal to belief in the liquefaction of St. Januarius’ blood are needs to drop the protective routine of years, to sheer off the dear and warm entanglements of home and friendships; to shut the front door one bleak winter evening when the hiuse smells comfortable and secure, and the light on the hearth, under such circumstances, is ironic in its bright revelation of years of ease and stability till then not fully appraised;”
― H M Tomlinson

“Women in the early forties who have been wives and mothers for over twenty years are liable to suffer from a slight sense of guilt whenever they embark on any purely self-regarding activity; but Lady Kilmichael had better reasons than this for her desire to avoid the eyes of acquaintances on her journey. She was leaving her home, her husband and her family - possibly for good.”
― Ann Bridge, Illyrian Spring

“But you left; you had to. Because you knew, if they didn’t, that Jeff Kerwin, Junior, wasn’t the boy they loved. Probably, if it came to that, the first Jeff Kerwin, your father, hadn’t been that boy either, and that was why he had left. They loved something they had made up for themselves and called their son, and perhaps, you thought, they’d even be happier with memories and no real boy around to destroy that image of their perfect son.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Bloody Sun

“The problem, I have decided, with people who never leave home is that they are never forced to become someone else.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“She went out and took a last long look at the shabby little library. She knew she would never see it again. Eyes changed after they looked at new things. If in the years to be she were to come back, her new eyes might make everything seem different from the way she saw it now. The way it was now was the way she wanted to remember it.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn