John Gould Quotes

Many nights, I longed for home. But it occurred to me as I struggled for a feeling of comfort and safety: I have no idea where home is.

But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you'll never truly be at home again. What you've left behind exists only in your memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you've left behind at every stop.

I have to live within my memories, within my private universe, and continually return to China, the land where my thoughts are locked. This is a very painful kind of existence, this feeling of nowhereness.

L.A. really doesn't feel like home to me anymore.

I loved New York, but I never quite felt like New York was my home either.

Nostalgia is eternal for Americans. We are often displaced from our origins and carry anxious memories of that lost past. We fear losing our bearings.

My connection with Brazil is so abstract. My blood and my way of thinking is Brazilian, but that's it. I don't tend to go back to the past, and although I have an apartment there, I rarely visit. When I move, I really move.

Is the modern social pattern of unending change and movement the cause of two modern diseases, insecurity and dissatisfaction? How lucky Thomas Hood was to be able to write, 'I remember, I remember the house where I was born.' I don't even know what mine looked like!

South Bend is a nice town, but you know that phrase - 'I was homesick even when I was home.'

I go to many different places many times, but I miss my house constantly.

For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return.

When I became conscious of being a person, when I was very small, I knew that I was from Indiana, but I had never seen Indiana. I was born there, but we moved when I was, like, a year old. I always had a sense of a place that was far away from where I was. I would research it and find out about it and I remember on Christmas morning I used to always call Indiana to find out what the weather was like; to see if it was snowing or not.

I had spent my whole life feeling homesick. The only difference between the two of us was that I didn't know what or where home was.

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

What greater grief than the loss of one's native land.

When I first left Iran at the age of 13, Iran had become such a shining star - it was the point to which all my desires and dreams returned.

The first time I lived in L.A. I was too young. I really wanted to be back home in Vancouver.

If you go anywhere, even paradise, you will miss your home.

The worst feeling in the world is the homesickness that comes over a man occasionally when he is at home.

I don't believe I could live in Iran again. A tree, once uprooted from the earth, is very difficult to plant again.

I don't know what 'home' or 'abroad' is any more.

I get homesick.

All I ever want is to return to either Bangladesh, my motherland, or India, my adopted home.

Exile is not a time frame. Exile is an experience. It's a sentiment.