Returning Quotes

“I visited many places,
Some of them quite
Exotic and far away,
But I always returned to myself.”
― Dejan Stojanovic

“for we all have
our own

twilights
and mists
and abysses

to return to.”
― Sanober Khan, A Thousand Flamingos

“We hear only our own voices, still echoes returning to our emptiness.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun

“Maybe this was what Aunt Peg meant all along - returning was a weird thing. You can never visit the same place twice. Each time, it's a different story. By the very act of coming back, you wipe our what came before.”
― Maureen Johnson, The Last Little Blue Envelope

“A man goes away from his home and it is in him to do it. He lies in strange beds in the dark, and the wind is different in the trees. He walks in the street and there are the faces in front of his eyes, but there are no names for the faces. the voices he hears are not the voices he carried away in his ears a long time back when he went away. The voices he hears are loud. they are so loud he does not hear for a long time at a stretch those voices he carried away in his ears. but there comes a minute when it is quiet and he can hear those voices he carried away in his ears a long time back. He can make out what they say, and they say: Come back. They say: Come back, boy. So he comes back.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

“How one can never truly leave. And never quite return. Do you understand?”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“I sit beside the fire and think of all that I have seen, of meadow-flowers and butterflies in summers that have been; Of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were, with morning mist and silver sun and wind upon my hair.
I sit beside the fire and think of how the world will be when winter comes without a spring that I shall ever see.
For still there are so many things that I have never seen: in every wood in every spring there is a different green.
I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago, and people who will see a world that I shall never know.
But all the while I sit and think of times there were before, I listen for returning feet and voices at the door.
(Fellowship of the Ring, Book II, chpt 3)”
― JRR Tolkien

“Will you go back?" asked the Lord of the Gallows. "To America?"
"Nothing to go back for," said Shadow, and as he said it he knew it was a lie.
"Things wait for you there," said the old man. "But they will wait until you return.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“Absolute is a game with only one player where Absolute forgets itself so it would have a reason to fulfill the motion while returning.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun

“In the end, the world returns to a grain.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987

“Connect with people who are going where you are going. Don’t hate people. The person you may need later may be likened to the bridge you have destroyed after crossing it. You’ll need that bridge when returning.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Shaping the dream

“Facing a language you don't know is like returning to your infancy when your mother tongue used to be a foreign language to you”
― Munia Khan

“But a wild creature will always go back to the wild, in the end.”
― Susan Cooper, The Selkie Girl

“Most of our fears are borrowed. Since that’s the case, we should get busy returning them.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“You may quickly realize after the death of a loved one that the day they died is not the hardest part. It may be the worst day of your life, but it is not the hardest part. The hardest part is returning to life again. Because while you had no say in your loved one’s dying, you do have a say in your living. And choosing to live after someone you love has died is one of the hardest choices we make. It’s okay if life after loss feels more like a struggle than the day your loved one died . . . because often, it is.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Your Grief, Your Way: A Year of Practical Guidance and Comfort After Loss

“As the ocean always returns to itself, love always returns to itself. So does consciousness, always returns to itself. And I do so with love on my lips. May God bless all mankind.”
― James Ronald Meanes

“Nobody goes anywhere
though we are always leaving and returning. It's a ceremony.
Sunrise occurs everywhere, in lizard time, human time, or a fern
uncurling time.”
― Joy Harjo, An American Sunrise

“Whenever a river reaches the ocean, it waits to go back..”
― Will Advise

“I've seen it before. Been here before. Played or managed here, six or seven times in six or seven years. Always a visitor, always away.”
― David Peace, The Damned Utd

“You have sometimes thought of going back?"

"Yes, I have, but only in a fantasy way.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“I said, unthinkingly: "I should like to go back."

It was a true statement. But then it came to me that I could not go back. One cannot, ever, go back to the place which exists in memory. You would not see it with the same eyes -- even supposing that it should improbably have remained much the same. What you have had you have had. 'The happy highways where I went/ And shall not come again . . .'

Never go back to a place where you have been happy. Until you do it remains alive for you. If you go back it will be destroyed.”
― Agatha Christie, Agatha Christie: An Autobiography

“I will rise again, and it will not be by Your blessings but by my own mastery! I will fly with my own wings.”
― Danielle Orsino, Locked Out of Heaven

“It felt odd and poetic and encouraging coming back after so many years, a shape imposing itself on life again after chaos.”
― Graham Greene, In Search of a Character

“There’s nothing wrong with coming back, the Sun does it every day. - On the Reluctance of Going Back”
― Lamine Pearlheart, Awakening

“It's like we come into the world to wait for the hour of our death. And what we do while waiting appears to be the only thing that truly matters.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Stamerenophobia

“Every second and every minute of the clock, we are getting closer and closer to our various destinations.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Stamerenophobia

“Sometimes we are called back to the things we most want to flee, perhaps because they left such a mark that we don’t know how to leave them behind.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“Returning, returning, was all I had wished for, but there was something below the surface and beyond the veils, that I was dreading to ask.”
― Sabrina Schultes, Honey Moon Marmalade

“Perhaps we think we can destroy the places of our past by returning: by reimagining, rebuilding. A utopia is, after all, a thing that rises from disaster, ruin, rubble. Without all that failure there can be no such thing as a utopia, since there would be no other reality to compare it to.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“It will all come out right in the end: the stars go home and so do we.”
― Peter Davidson, The Lighted Window: Evening Walks Remembered