Ruben Blades Quotes

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

I can't really live outside Jamaica. I can be away, but only for a while.

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

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

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

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

I cannot live anywhere else except India.

I was eight when I left Sarajevo, so I didn't really know very much about my culture and it was so important for me to go back to my roots and meet the people.

Although I was always very happy in Britain, I never stopped thinking of America as home, in the fundamental sense of the term. It was where I came from, what I really understood, the base against which all else was measured.

A writer without his country is nothing.

I'm living in California but I have a place that is mine in Chile and I belong there. I am no longer an exile.

It's part of me, Scotland. I'm still immersed in it even though I am not there.

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

What any immigrant is after is a taste of home.

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.

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.

What captivity has been to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish. For us, the romance of our native land begins only after we have left home; it is really only with other people that we become Irishmen.

More than anything I want to be able to go back to Cuba, to have a house to visit there, to know my roots. Then, at last, I could sing for my people.

New York has given me a lot, but I still don't consider it home.

My birthplace was California, but I couldn't forget Armenia, so what is one's country? Is it land of the earth, in a specific place? Rivers there? Lakes? The sky there? The way the moon comes up there? And the sun? Is one's country the trees, the vineyards, the grass, the birds, the rocks, the hills and summer and winter? Is it the animal rhythm of the living there? The huts and houses, the streets of cities, the tables and chairs, and the drinking of tea and talking? Is it the peach ripening in summer heat on the bough? Is it the dead in the earth there?

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

It is a well-known fact that we always recognize our homeland at the moment we are about to lose it.

Uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots.

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.