Homesick Quotes

“If it is possible to be homesick for the world, even places one has never been and knows one will never see, this book is the child of such homesickness.”

— Huston Smith

“Most of the people are homesick anyway, and a little lonely, and they hide themselves in their hair and are turned into flowers.”

— Tove Jansson

“Was it possible to be homesick for a soul?”

— Jessica Dotta

“Look, Mrs. McGillicuddy, it's not my fault your son jumped out a dorm room window on Christmas eve. I've written over fifty books as a Columbia professor, all right? You don't do that by holding hands with every at-risk undergraduate who says he's homesick, or he's turning gay, or the dog ate his term paper. I write about Lincoln, and freedom, and great ideas. I don't always have time for students. It's like Dean Martin used to say: if you want to talk, go to a priest.
Hey
what's the gun for?”

— Eric Foner

“It is necessary to find one's own way in New York. New York City is not hospitable. She is very big and she has no heart. She is not charming. She is not sympathetic. She is rushed and noisy and unkempt, a hard, ambitious, irresolute place, not very lively, and never gay. When she glitters she is very, very bright, and when she does not glitter she is dirty. New York does nothing for those of us who are inclined to love her except implant in our hearts a homesickness that baffles us until we go away from her, and then we realize why we are restless. At home or away, we are homesick for New York not because New York used to be better and not because she used to be worse but because the city holds us and we don't know why.”

— Maeve Brennan

“I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.”

— John Cheever

“And so they played some of the world's loveliest piano music - the exiled homesick girl, the humiliated, tired old man. Not properly. Better than that.”

— Eva Ibbotson

“It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.”

— Don DeLillo

“Name me no names for my disease,
With uninforming breath;
I tell you I am none of these,
But homesick unto death -Homesick for hills that I had known,
For brooks that I had crossed,
... Before I met this flesh and bone
And followed and was lost ... .And though they break my heart at last,
Yet name no name of ills.
Say only, Here is where he passed,
Seeking again those hills.”

— Witter Bynner

“It was not just the drink, though, that was making me happy, but the tenderness of things, the simple goodness of the world. This sunset, for instance, how lavishly it was laid on, the clouds, the light on the sea, that heartbreaking, blue-green distance, laid on, all of it, as if to console some lost suffering waybarer. I have never really got used to being on this earth. Somethings I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, they would have become extinct long ago. How could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was meant to contain us?”

— John Banville

“But to be a parent is to live in the past-present-future all at once. It is to hug your children and be intensely aware of how much smaller they felt last year ... even as you wonder how much bigger they will feel the next. It is to be a time-shifter, to marvel at the budding of their intellect, their verbal dexterity, their sense of humor ... at the same time rewinding and fast-forwarding ... to when they were younger, to when they'll be older. It is to experience longing for the here and now, which I know sounds flaky - sort of like complaining about being homesick when you're already home - but can happen, trust me, when you live in multiple time zones all at once.”

— Youngme Moon

“Wherever I live, I shall feel homesick for Tibet. I often think I can still hear the cries of wild geese and cranes and the beating of their wings as they fly over Lhasa in the clear, cold moonlight. My heartfelt wish is that my story may create some understanding for a people whose will to live in peace and freedom has won so little sympathy from an indifferent world.”

— Heinrich Harrer

“Hey, T-Rex? Remind me next time I want to get smartass with you that it's a really stupid move on my part? (Talon)
Oh, no, you don't, you wuss. You told me the next time you saw Ash you were going to ask him if he'd seen the movie 10,000 BC and if it'd made him homesick. (Wulf)”

— Sherrilyn Kenyon

“I did become homesick, and whenever that happened, I'd hide away in the school library, where the books filled rows and rows of shelves. I'd find a chair and study my lesson books in geography, social studies, biology, and math. I'd lose myself in American and African history, and within the colorful maps of the world. No matter how foreign and lonely the world was outside, the books always reminded me of home, sitting under the mango tree.”

— William Kamkwamba

“It's a world full of terror and beauty (here her writing became so small Meggie could hardly make it out) and I could always understand why Dustfinger felt homesick for it.
The last sentence worried Meggie, but when she looked anxiously at her mother, Teresa smiled and reached for her hand. I was far, far more homesick for you two, she wrote on the palm of it, and Meggie closed her fingers over the words as if to hold them fast. She read them again and again on the long drive back to Elinor's house, and it was many days before they faded.”

— Cornelia Funke

“His boredom was like a nostalgia for the whole world. He was homesick for everywhere but here.”

— Christopher Isherwood

“I AM homesick after mine own kind,
Oh I know that there are folk about me,
friendly faces,
But I am homesick after mine own kind.”

— Ezra Pound

“And I am homesick After mine own kind that know, and feel And have some breath for beauty and the arts.”

— Ezra Pound

“But those two circles, above all the point at which they touched, are the very thing I am mourning for, homesick for, famished for. You tell me 'she goes on.' But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back. Be a circle, touching my circle on the plane of Nature. But I know this is impossible. I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get.”

— C.S. Lewis

“I can get on with all different sorts of people, and I never feel homesick, particularly, or I've never felt kind of patriotic towards any one country.”

— Andy Serkis

“The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.”

— Anne Tyler

“I don't especially like to travel, not the way many people do. I know many people that love to go to far-off and different places, and I've never been like that. I seem to get homesick as quickly as a child.”

— Elizabeth Strout

“One thing I wish I'd done differently in my career is insist on having friends or family on tour. I was really young when I travelled the world with Eternal, and I was always homesick.”

— Louise Nurding

“Our words had to be circumspect. We could not write anything too negative about our circumstances. This was tricky, since the very form of a married woman's letter needed to include the usual complaints
that we were pathetic, powerless, worked to the bone, homesick, and sad. We were supposed to speak directly about our feelings without appearing ungrateful, no-account, or unfilial.”

— Lisa See

“Diana frowns. "You're taking me home, right? You just said you would." "Hoink hoink! Of course, piglet. But I meant your real home." "Which, last I checked," says Diana acidly, "is in Los Angeles, California, United States of America, solar system, planet Earth." "Hmm," says the boar, hiccupping dreamily. "That's what you think, darling. Tell me, can you say you've felt really at home at that address? Haven't you been homesick your whole life?”

— Martha N. Beck

“I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick.”

— Joseph Conrad

“I would have loved to have cracked America. When I tried, I got homesick. Then, when I was in New York, my nanna died, and I just wanted to come home.”

— Cilla Black

“I came into Chicago in winter - I'd never been so cold in my life! I was very homesick, and a poor student at that time. America seemed so different and so filled with amazing things - and almost all of them were out of my reach.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

“If you've ever been homesick, or felt exiled from all the things and people that once defined you, you'll know how important welcoming words and friendly smiles can be.”

— Stephen King

“Homesickness is absolutely nothing," she said angrily. "It is absolutely nothing. Fifty per cent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. But I don't suppose you're old enough to understand. When you're in one place and long to be in another, it isn't as simple as taking a boat. You don't really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don't have, or haven't been able to find.”

— John Cheever

“When I first moved to London, I felt very homesick and yearned after the countryside a lot. Because London's hard. It's a big place, and it's lonely. It takes a while to get into it. But once I got into the flow of it and started to grow up, I realised that my home is wherever I am.”

— Toby Kebbell

“When I got a bad grade in my old boarding school, Kate would make a trip to the school to chew me out. When I got homesick, I'd flunk a grade on purpose. Sometimes she came by herself. Sometimes with other people. Boy kind of people. Of whom I promised myself I wouldn't be thinking about, because they were idiots.”

— Ilona Andrews

“You're not built for riding, either," Horace added. "I'd say more saddle sore than homesick."
Svenal sighed ruefully, shifting his buttocks for the twentieth time to find a more comfortable spot.
"It's true," he said. "I've been discovering parts of my backside I never knew existed.”

— John Flanagan

“A rabbit sneeze on the morning breeze sets homesick hearts aglow sitting with his rumps in a chicory clump and longing for a nice plump doe.”

— Richard Adams

“At the time the world was all upside down. The American people were beginning to move around a lot. The old hometown ties had been pretty much broken. The theme of Farmer Takes a Wife appealed to people. Everybody was homesick. And it sold and sold and sold.”

— John Gould

“In the fullness of artistic life there is, and remains, and will always come back at times, that homesick longing for the truly ideal life that can never come true.”

— Vincent Van Gogh

“Sometimes he felt like he'd been gone his whole life
in exile, away from the place he was supposed to be, and that, soldier-like, he was pining to be returned. Homesick for a place he'd never been.”

— Gillian Flynn

“It is a sad hardship and slavery to people who live in towns, that in their movements they know of one dimension only; they walk along the line as if they were led on a string. The transition from the line to the plane into the two dimensions, when you wander across a field or through a wood, is a splendid liberation to the slaves, like the French Revolution. But in the air you are taken into the full freedom of the three dimensions; after long ages of exile and dreams the homesick heart throws itself into the arms of space.”

— Karen Blixen

“I am alone in the world, Dolores, and I am homesick for my own kind.”

— Kate DiCamillo

“A girl from Pittsburgh was a good thing, like an anchor. Every homesick traveler should have one.”

— Kelly Link

“It was possible to be homesick for a time, and to be lonely for the only other person who could recall it.”

— Robin Hobb

“Paris is one of the most beautiful places in all the world. Unfortunately, I was so homesick I couldn't appreciate its beauty.”

— Tyra Banks

“We are homesick for places, we are reminded of places, it is the sounds and smells and sights of places which haunt us and against which we often measure our present.”

— Alan Gussow

“Sometimes ... we grow homesick for heaven. Many times in the midst of the sin, suffering, and sorrow of this life there is a tug at our soul. That is homesickness coupled with anticipation.”

— Billy Graham

“You can hate a place with all your heart and soul and still be homesick for it.”

— Joseph Mitchell

“Do not make homes out of people. This will leave you homesick and sad.”

— K.Michelle

“The hardest thing about moving to California from Connecticut was just missing my family. If I went back, it would be just because I was homesick.”

— Kevin Nealon

“It may just be because I get homesick, but I have concluded Washington's cherry blossoms are just plain overrated.”

— Newt Gingrich

“I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree.”

— William Butler Yeats

“I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful.”

— Henry David Thoreau