Back At Home Quotes

“To be fair, you can tell me what you think of me," Max offered. "I didn't mean to offend you. I was just making a few observations."
"How could I possibly know enough about you to make a proper judgment?" His tone was harsher than he'd anticipated. "You've taken a stranger into your home without so much as a second thought and offered everything but your bed. Crazy comes to mind. Suicidal maybe."
Max leaned forward in her chair, readying her defenses. "Excuse me?"
"I don't mean to sound ungrateful here but please remember that you don't know me. I appreciate all that you've done but that doesn't entitle you to judge me."
"I wasn't judging you," she bit back. "But maybe you're right. I don't think I thought this through at all.”

— Shawn Kirsten Maravel

“How she wished she were back at home with her family, strumming her banjo on the porch while Grampa Cornpone played the fiddle. Oh, the steamy bayou nights of her youth! Ma would cook up a huge pan of Creole innards, whilst Pa sat in the corner smoking his pipe of tabaccy with the hound dogs snoozing at his feet.”

— Howard Mittelmark

“As soon as she says this, I realize she is just like everyone else, and wish I was back at home so that all the things I do not understand could be the same as they always are.”

— Claire Keegan

“Back at home I spent so much time on my own, but never once felt lonely. Here, even though I see hundreds more people each day, I've never felt lonelier.”

— Giovanna Fletcher

“Meanwhile she's coldly interrogating me with her eyes. She's definitely in charge of this house and this moment. This must be Chloe.
She escorts me to a table full of people and presents me. She introduces them briefly. This one's from Morocco, that one from Italy, he's Persian
I'm not exactly sure what that means
this one's from "the UK." They're all in their twenties, poised and dismissive. They don't know or care who I'm supposed to be at home or where I went to school. They're measuring something else I can't see and don't understand.
They nod and turn back to each other. They seem to be waiting for a cue from Chloe to release them from having to feign interest. She introduces herself at substantially more length. Her father is Chinese and her mother is Swiss; she grew up in Hong Kong and "in Europe."
I grew up in Michigan and in Michigan. But she didn't ask.”

— Kenneth Cain

“Whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.”

— Roald Dahl

“Back at home, after some prodding from Tereza, he admitted that he had been jealous watching her dance with a colleague of his. "You mean you were really jealous?" she asked him ten times or more, incredulously, as though someone had just informed her she had been awarded a Nobel Peace prize. Then she put her arm around his waist and began dancing across the room. The step she used was not the one she had shown off in the bar. It was more like a village polka, a wild romp that sent her legs flying in the air and her torso bounding all over the room, with Tomas in tow. Before long, unfortunately, she bagan to be jealous herself, and Tomas saw her jealously not as a Nobel Prize, but as a burden, a burden he would be saddled with until not long before his death.”

— Milan Kundera

“I'm tipsy, not blitzed."
Max twisted back and pulled into the road. "What chance I got you won't pass out on the way home?"
I waved my hand in front of me and declared, "Oh, I'll be fine."
"Right," Max muttered.
"Can we listen to music?" I requested and Max turned on the music.
Five minutes later I was dead to the world.”

— Kristen Ashley

“Back at home, people would have been weeping and doing a lot of very public group hugs. At Wexford, some people just aggressively pretended nothing was happening.”

— Maureen Johnson

“Getting rid of dragons is not at all in my line, but I will do my best to think about it. Personally I have no hopes at all, and wish I was safe back at home.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien

“He still had ten times that amount of aconite stored back at home. No, the trouble really was, here was this lovely woman with the light brown eyes and radiant face, with whom it was wonderful to be talking-and yet he would never be able to kiss her. When he got home to the backwoods he'd hardly believe that he'd been sitting here, right next to such a radiant woman, and that she had wanted to save his life, whatever the cost.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“He put one hand lightly on the back of her neck and simultaneously she placed one hand lightly on his hip, and they kissed in the street as all around them people hurried home in the summer light, and it was the sweetest kiss that either of them would ever know. This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today. And then it was over.”

— David Nicholls

“It is also very engaging - and a delight - to go back to Bangladesh as often as I can, which is not only my old home, but also where some of my closest friends and collaborators live and work.”

— Amartya Sen

“When you look into the faces of these quiet creatures who don't know how to tell stories
who are mute, who can't make themselves heard, who fade into the woodwork, who only think of the perfect answer after the fact, after they're back at home, who can never think of a story that anyone else will find interesting
is there not more depth and more meaning in them? You can see every letter of every untold story swimming on their faces, and all the signs of silence, dejection, and even defeat. You can even imagine your own face in those faces, can't you?”

— Orhan Pamuk

“To bring home conviction to crowds it is necessary first of all to thoroughly comprehend the sentiments by which they are animated, to pretend to share these sentiments, then to endeavour to modify them by calling up, by means of rudimentary associations, certain eminently suggestive notions, to be capable, if need be, of going back to the point of view from which a start was made, and, above all, to divine from instant to instant the sentiments to which one's discourse is giving birth.”

— Gustave Le Bon

“I think a submarine is a very worthwhile weapon. I believe we can defend ourselves with submarines and all our troops back at home. This whole idea that we have to be in 130 countries and 900 bases ... is an old-fashioned idea.”

— Ron Paul

“The night I flew out from Rwanda, I landed in Nairobi, and I was on my way back home, and my left side started to paralyze and remained paralyzed with pain, and the stress and so on began to appear physically.”

— Romeo Dallaire

“It was always a challenge for me to prove that a Russian financial investor can be as successful in the West as back at home in Russia.”

— Alisher Usmanov

“When I'm back at home it's just reality. I kind of separate myself from Hollywood.”

— Logan Lerman

“When McGwire started the home run mania, attendance came back. The owners understood that the sudden spike in homers wasn't accidental. All baseball knew it. But baseball is run on money, and home runs meant money. Baseball turned a blind eye.”

— Gary Sheffield

“Back at home, days later, feel cranky and tired. Sit on the couch and tell him he's stupid. That you bet he doesn't know who Coriolanus is. That since you moved in you've noticed he rarely reads. He will give you a hurt, hungry-to-learn look, with his James Cagney eyes. He will try to kiss you. Turn your head. Feel suffocated. (from "How")”

— Lorrie Moore

“I'd have to fight for an Australian role over an American actor, and I already have to do that overseas, so why would I have to do it back at home?”

— Bojana Novakovic

“And we were all aware that the forces that held back our bodies back at home were not unrelated to those that had given France its wealth. We were aware that much of what they had done was built on the plunder of Haitian bodies, on the plunder of Wolof bodies, on the destruction of the Toucouleur, on the taking of Bissandugu.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“The Americans have always been better than the Iraqis at the leaflets. Early on in the first Gulf War, Iraqi PsyOps dropped a batch of their own leaflets on US troops, designed to be psychologically devastating. They read, 'Your wives are back at home having sex with Bart Simpson and Burt Reynolds.”

— Jon Ronson

“The American School of Paris is one of those strange places in foreign cities where expatriates huddle together in a defensive circle and try to pretend they're still back at home.
I saw it as a place for lost souls.”

— Amy Plum

“Perhaps it goes without saying that I believe in the geographic cure. Of course you can't out-travel sadness. You will find it has smuggled itself along in your suitcase. It coats the camera lens, it flavors the local cuisine. In that different sunlight, it stands out, awkward, yours, honking in the brash vowels of your native tongue in otherwise quiet restaurants. You may even feel proud of its stubbornness as it follows you up the bell towers and monuments, as it pants in your ear while you take in the view. I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings or on deserted beaches. I take them for walks. Sometimes I get them drunk. Back at home we generally understand each other better.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

“I hear good things about Xbox Live from some of my younger teammates. I think it would be fun to be able to challenge fans all over the world. It would be cool to be able to play some of my friends back home in the States. I'm looking forward to trying it.”

— Claudio Reyna

“I was raised in a group home for 14 years, so I was a beneficiary of philanthropy. I didn't have a family. The nameless, faceless strangers were my family. They gave me an education, put food on the table and clothes on my back. I am who I am because of that formative experience. Now I am paying it forward.”

— Darell Hammond

“I feel greatful, though, that Sabin was my home base tonight. He let me come back to him as often as I needed to ground myself. When the noise was too much or the social interaction felt overwhelming, he remained my rock.”

— Jessica Park

“I wrote '('Til) I Kissed You' about a girl I met in Australia. Her name was Lilian, and she was very, very inspirational. I was married, but ... I wrote the song about her on the way back home.”

— Don Everly

“Back at home they drew the curtains and read, with disapproval, with relish, with avidity and glee - even the ones who'd never thought of opening a novel before. There's nothing like a shovelful of dirt to encourage literacy.”

— Margaret Atwood

“We were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as 'being in one's right mind.”

— Aldous Huxley

“When I was fifteen, a companion and I, on a dare, went into the mound one day just at sunset. We saw some of those Indians for the first time; we got directions from them and reached the top of the mound just as the sun set. We had camping equiptment with us, but we made no fire. We didn't even make down our beds. We just sat side by side on that mound until it became light enough to find our way back to the road. We didn't talk. When we looked at each other in the gray dawn, our faces were gray, too, quiet, very grave. When we reached town again, we didn't talk either. We just parted and went home and went to bed. That's what we thought, felt, about the mound. We were children, it is true, yet we were descendants of people who read books and who were, or should have been, beyond superstition and impervious to mindless fear.”

— William Faulkner

“People everywhere, enjoying life, smiling, and just slowing down to let the world take care of itself for a few hours.
The feeling was contagious. Especially when I stepped into McPherson's Pub to grab a bite of the special and listen to some traditional Irish music. The fiddle made me want to dance with myself, and many did. The drum beat like my very own heart. And some little flute that looked no wider than a pencil reminded me of the Aran Islands floating not too far from Abbeyglen.
God was here tonight. In the strings of the guitar and the call of the singer's voice. I realize how often I overlook him back at home.
And I know I don't want to do that anymore.
The LORD will send His faithful love by day; His song will be with me in the night a prayer to the Gid of my life.”

— Jenny B. Jones

“Chanting is a simple practice. When you notice you are thinking about something else during the chant, let go of the thought and come back home, to the chant, to that place where we are expressing our inner purity.”

— Sharon Salzberg

“More than anything else, I want the folks back at home to think right of me.”

— Elvis Presley

“Just because I managed to do a little something, I don't want anyone back home to think I got the big head.”

— Elvis Presley

“Today's misery is real unemployment, home foreclosures and bankruptcies. This is the Obama Misery Index and its at a record high. Its going to take more than new rhetoric to put Americans back to work - its going to take a new president.”

— Mitt Romney

“With all this snow, with the sun not there, with the cold and dreariness, this place doesn't look like my America, doesn't even look real. It's like we are in a terrible story, like we're in the crazy parts of the Bible, there where God is busy punishing people for their sins and is making them miserable with all the weather. The sky, for example, has stayed white all this time I have been here, which tells you that something is not right. Even the stones know that a sky is supposed to be blue, like our sky back home, which is blue, so blue you can spray Clorox on it and wipe it with a paper towel and it wouldn't even come off.”

— NoViolet Bulawayo

“I like to listen to mellow stuff on the road like Travis, as we are constantly surrounded by rock music on tour and so its nice listening to mellow stuff. Obviously back at home I listen to a lot more rock music.”

— Ville Valo

“Unlike the women she'd known back at home, these women didn't thrive on gossip. They built each other up rather than tearing each other down.”

— Marie Force

“GRATIANO
I have a wife I love. I wish she were in heaven so she could appeal to some power to make this dog Jew change his mind.
NERISSA
It's nice you're offering to sacrifice her behind her back. That wish of yours could start quite an argument back at home.”

— William Shakespeare

“So that's who Finnick loves, I think. Not his string of fancy lovers in the Capitol. But a poor, mad girl back home.”

— Suzanne Collins

“When I retire and I'm back at home with me kids, they're not going to care that I smiled too much on the field. They're not going to care what kind of team player I was.”

— Jim Edmonds

“Between the postwar fifties - domesticity, people happy to be alive after the Second World War, wanting to build a home, make a family, make a nest. Women were pushed back into the home after having been active in the Second World War. It was a big Doris Day moment for women, which didn't suit all women.”

— Sally Potter

“I used to be a lot more engaged on an improvisational level than other people. I was always on tour and always had a guitar in my hands, and when I went back home, my battery was at full charge. I had a lot of energy to get off, just impulses that I could draw upon.”

— Bradford Cox

“When I went back home, I was constantly being reminded, I'm an African woman, and so there are certain things I shouldn't do, certain ambitions that I should not entertain. That was a problem for me because I had never thought of myself as an African woman, never thought of myself as a woman to begin with. For me the limit was my capacity, my capability.”

— Wangari Maathai

“When I was 10 years old, we'd pick out a cow and boom! They'd hit it in the head with a hammer, lift it up by the back legs, and skin it in front of us. Then I'd take the head home and make soup”

— Wilmer Valderrama

“I never go to the Grammys. I just never go. I don't know if I care enough, and I went because my son wanted to go, and they asked us to present Best Hip Hop Group of the Year. You know, we had two records from Compton in there, and it was just like a cool thing to do, and to do with your son, and it was just cool. But we was the first award up, so after I did my thing I just jumped in the car and came on back home.”

— Ice Cube

“I think I was always informally thinking about choice from when I was a very young child because I was born to Sikh immigrant parents, so I was constantly going back and forth between a Sikh household and an American outside world, so I was going back and forth between a very traditional Sikh home in which you had to follow the Five K's.”

— Sheena Iyengar