Salman Rushdie Quotes

Before Hurricane Katrina, I always felt like I could come back home. And home was a real place, and also it had this mythical weight for me. Because of the way that Hurricane Katrina ripped everything away, it cast that idea in doubt.

All I wanted was what I'd already had. That exultation, that love. It was my one real home; I was a visitor everywhere else.

Though the last glimpse of Erin with sorrow I see, Yet wherever thou art shall seem Erin to me; In exile thy bosom shall still be my home, And thine eyes make my climate wherever we roam.

Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there any more.

Home is where you feel at home. I'm still looking.

This was nostalgia in the literal Greek sense: the pain of not being able to return to one's home and family.

Delhi is my emotional home. I still dream of owning a home there.

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.

I escaped to New York, and then L.A., but when I dream of home, I still dream of my old house in Holmdel.

I didn't feel like I had a home until I moved to El Paso.

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

Over the years I’ve collected a thousand memories of you, every glimpse, every word you’ve ever said to me. All those visits to your family’s home, those dinners and holidays—I could hardly wait to walk through the front door and see you.” The corners of his mouth quirked with reminiscent amusement. “You, in the middle of that brash, bull-headed lot…I love watching you deal with your family. You’ve always been everything I thought a woman should be. And I have wanted you every second of my life since we first met.

Home is wherever I go.

I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home.

Through my college years, topping that ridge had always given me a great sense of being home, but time had diminished the emotion and I had begun to suspect that home was less a place than an empty page.

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.

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

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.

It was not a triumphal return. Home, as I had known it, was gone.

The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.

We have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.

It is more than twenty years since we left the city. This is a serious chunk of time, longer than the years we spent living there. Yet we still think of Jerusalem as our home. Not home in the sense of the place that you conduct your daily life or constantly return to. In fact, Jerusalem is our home almost against our wills. It is our home because it defines us, whether we like it or not.

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

From the beginning, I've stressed that home is something internal, invisible, portable, especially for those of us with roots in many physical places; we have to root ourselves in our passions, our values and our deepest friends. My home, I've always felt, lies in the songs and novels that I love, in the wife and mother that I'm never far away from, in the monastery to which I've been returning for 25 years.

You can go home again...so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.