Jesmyn Ward Quotes

When memories fade, can one ever really return home?

Homeland is something one becomes aware of only through its loss.

I feel like I've never had a home, you know? I feel related to the country, to this country, and yet I don't know exactly where I fit in... There's always this kind of nostalgia for a place, a place where you can reckon with yourself.

It's strange coming back to Northern Ireland, but it feels like a home away from home.

I sing 'Beirut' for what the city is for me, but I am also singing as an exile.

In America, we all come from somewhere else, and we carry along some dream myth of home: a notion that something - our point of origin, our roots, the home country - is out there.

Growing up, I never really felt like anything was my own. I moved a lot, and I never belonged anywhere.

On the flight over to the Gulf of Mexico, I wondered about how they say you can never go home again, but maybe an equally expensive reality is how many people, regardless of how many years or miles they put between themselves and where they were born, are never truly able to leave home.

I never seem to leave L.A., though I left L.A.

I've lived in Texas now longer than anywhere and then California and then Oklahoma, but yet Oklahoma is what I consider home.

The room shall speak, it must catch me up and hold me, I want to feel that I belong here, I want to hearken and know when I go back to the front line that the war will sink down, be drowned utterly in the great home-coming tide, know that it will then be past for ever, and not gnaw us continually, that it will have none but an outward power over us...Nothing stirs; listless and wretched, like a condemned man, I sit there and the past withdraws itself. And at the same time I fear to importune it too much, because I do not know what might happen then. I am a soldier, I must cling to that.

Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were. It hasn’t happened this morning, either.

I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now--only that place where the books are kept.

I am delighted to be back home in Galway, the place I first came to as a 19-year-old in 1960. It's here where my heart is and will forever be.

I've gone very far, far away, but my character keeps me close to home.

And I think a lot of us have fantasies of going back to where we're from, or when we do go back we're so nostalgic about it.

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

The thing about coming back to the Bay Area, it's like coming home for me.

I have a very powerful sense of place, but I have a very powerful sense of being a migrant, so it's both. It seems like I'm always leaving my home. That's part of the formula. I love the Dominican Republic. I go back all the time. I love New Jersey. Go back all the time.

England will be home for me. It always has been and always will be.

I only realised why I keep living in Shepperton when I returned to China. All the people who moved there had come from places just like Shepperton, and so they built and lived in houses exactly like these. I now know I was drawn here because, on an unconscious level, Shepperton reminds me of Shanghai.

In the true sense one's native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.

When you finally go back to your old home, you find it wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood.

I've spent lots of time in London, I studied in London, I like London. It's just not my home.

Even though I live in America more, I feel like when I go to Adelaide, that's when I get to go home.