Returning Home Quotes

“Hearts grow hard and weary. Pain spreads, and joy diminishes. Those who hated you hate you still, but those who loved you, or would have loved you, or wanted to love you but never had the chance, are being scraped hollow by a loss they don't understand. Come home. Please come home. We are withering without you.”
― Bruce Coville, Dark Whispers

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

“Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American

“They Served

...reliving memories
that will not die
giving their all
for you and I -
friends taken
lives shaken...”
― Muse, Enigmatic Evolution

“Being at home was like a mattress to fall back on with the smallest of peas on the bottom, just large enough to bother the princess. I was damn lucky that I had a place to call home, but I didn't like the feeling of stealing my parents food and being unable to tell them when I could ever afford my own.”
― Alida Nugent, Don't Worry, It Gets Worse: One Twentysomething's (Mostly Failed) Attempts at Adulthood

“Returning to my dreams was like returning to home after a long time of being away - everything was exactly the same as you left it, except infinitely better.”
― Aishabella Sheikh, Entwined

“She had not thought it would be so easy to slip into the old roles. Cambridge had changed her fundamentally and she thought she was immune. No one in her family, however, noticed the transformation in her, and she was not able to resist the power of their habitual expectations.”
― Ian McEwan

“Every traveller returns home.”
― David Levithan, Someday

“Eventually, we all make it home, and we each make an individual path by any means.”
― Joy Harjo, Catching the Light

“Home is what you make, not what you find”
― Christie Valentine Powell, The Spectra Uprooted

“For a moment I felt the quiet hungering thing that comes inside when you return to the place of your origins, and then the ache of mis-belonging. It was beautiful, this place, and it was savage. It swallowed you and made you a part of itself, or it you proved too inassimilable, it spit you out like the pit of a plum.
I’d left here of my own will, and yet it seemed the city had banished in much the same way I’d banished it. Seeing it now after so long, seeing the marsh grass pitching wildly around the edges of the city, the rooftops hunkered together with their ship watches and widow walks, and behind them, the steeples of St Philip’s and St Michael’s lifted like dark fingers, I was not sorry for loving Charleston or for leaving it. Geography had made me who I was.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings

“Here's the truth: No matter what happened on the stage tonight, no matter where you went when you drove out of here, no matter where you end up, no matter what happens, what you become, what you gain, what you lose, whether you succeed or fail, stand or fall, no matter what you dip your hands into...no gone is too far gone.

You can always come home.

And when you do, you'll find me standing right here, arms wide, eyes searching for your return.

I love you.”
― Charles Martin, Long Way Gone

“To feel one’s attachment to a certain region, one’s love for a certain group of men, to know that there is always a spot where one’s heart will feel at peace – these are many certainties for a single human life. And yet this is not enough. But at certain moments everything yearns for that spiritual home. ‘Yes, we must go back there – there, indeed.”
― Albert Camus, Summer in Algiers

“Can one be lost, when no destination awaits? When no home longs for one’s return?”
― Brock Meier, The Stone Cutter: A novel of Petra In Ancient Arabia

“Last winter I went down to my native town, where I found the streets much narrower and shorter than I thought I had left them, inhabited by a new race of people, to whom I was very little known. My play-fellows were grown old, and forced me to suspect that I was no longer young. My only remaining friend has changed his principles, and was become the tool of the predominant faction. My daughter-in-law, from whom I expected most, and whom I met with sincere benevolence, has lost the beauty and gaiety of youth, without having gained much of the wisdom of age. I wandered about for five days, and took the first convenient opportunity of returning to a place, where, if there is not much happiness, there is, at least, such a diversity of good and evil, that slight vexations do not fix upon the heart.”
― Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson

“By that point a career change was beyond consideration; he was a bottle, thrown to the sea, into which the villagers had folded their wishes, and though he was willing to give up on himself, he wasn’t willing to let down those who believed he could carry them over the water.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“I have lived here before the days of ice, of course this is why I am so concerned, and I come back to find the stars misplaced and the smell of a world that has burned.
So where do I purchase my ticket…I'd like to have a ringside seat. I want to know about the new Mother Earth. I want to hear and see EVERYTHING.”
― Jimi Hendrix, Cherokee Mist: The Lost Writings

“There are still many white mountains to cross, but I am on my way home.”
― Ma Jian, Red Dust: A Path Through China

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

“I guess that's the thing about coming home; it's not the home that's changed, it's the person coming back who has.”
― Meagan Church, The Last Carolina Girl

“Hotels are for leaving,
Home is for returning.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Insan Himalayanoğlu: It's Time to Defect

“I want to be so successful that one day my mom never has to buy a thing for herself again”
― Chrisper Malamsha

“Yes, I know. You don't understand—I love you because of what you did, not despite it.”
― Chester Brown, Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus: Prostitution and Religious Obedience in the Bible

“Nature is the only home I know.
Nature is the only home there is.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“Why does adulting have to suck so much? All our lives we rush to get older, to have say over what we do, but it never happens. As long as we have parents, their input, their manipulation, their feelings are always taken into account.”
― Lacy Chantell, Wild Heart

“Here's to thee, old apple-tree,
To buds in the spring and roots in the loam,
To the Fae who brings the apples home.
---Wassail song”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“The grandfather clock gonged three. Papa spoke a word that sounded like a spell, though I couldn't be sure. It was neither kind nor cruel. It was simply a wheel going into its grooves. All I knew then was that I was falling through time, years opening up into a black abyss that swallowed me whole. When they spit me out I was sixteen again, Dr. Bakay's hands on my budding breasts; I was thirteen, eating my bird-mother for supper; I was elven and Papa was dragging me down the stairs and into the foyer so I could tell fortunes for men with lust in their eyes. I was nine and lying awake at night at Papa's footsteps made the wood ache and groan.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“Except that it was not fog but a body forming before her eyes out of a stream reflecting golden sunlight, a yellow checkered tablecloth, and the bones of two hundred goldfinches.
Donkey forgot how to breathe. She opened the door wider and in doing so somehow flipped the contents of the hot pan onto the porch planks. Now the figure was fully conjured, tipping back in the chair, as Donkey was forbidden to do. There was Rose Thorn with her bare brown feet resting on the table, legs crossed at her slender ankles, her hands clasped behind her head, shiny hair as windblown as feathers. All around her, in the mid-morning haze, golden light fingered upward. Rosie was as perfect as a perfect number with all her factors adding up to make the sum of her, and the whole day felt fresh and breezy.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“I have never returned to this lost paradise. Sometimes I am struck with the sudden desire to go to the Gare de lest, board the Orient Express, and retrace the route between Innsbruck and Plumeshof. As I so often saw other more or less close friends of the Welser family do, I fantasize about showing up without warning in the pretty meadow surrounded by fir trees and making the climb to the house while thinking only of Aunt Heidi, who has long since gone the to join her two older sons and their father in heaven. I would concentrate on her so strongly that I would eventually see her again on the doorstep, hastily drying her flour-covered hands in her apron; her opal eyes would brighten when she saw me. She would spread her arms while joyfully shouting: "Franziska!" and I would run to her calling back, "Aunt Heidi, Aunt Heidi!" Kurt's Kurt's contagious laughter would echo in the distance. Lilo, smiling, would be hanging out the laundry. A lifetime of love would still be stretching out before them. A delicious aroma of pancakes would be drifting in the air ... The large earthenware oven, the eiderdown quilts, the painted wooden chairs with a little heart carved in them like the shutters ... nothing would have changed.”
― Françoise Hardy, The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles: A Memoir by Françoise Hardy

“Tomorrow, we may fray like ribbon or scatter like stars, but we are capable of returning to the knot, to the sky, to each other. We are capable.”
― Kailey Bright, Unity