Wallace Stegner Quotes

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

I am not quite sure where home is right now. I do have places in London and Milan, and a house in Spain. I guess I would say home is where my mother is, and she lives in Spain.

A man who lives everywhere lives nowhere.

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

Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.

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.

One of my clearest impressions about India as a child was that my parents' stories would have been impossible had they stayed. Of course, such a vision was self-serving, for it made a virtue of our displacement.

I never felt truly at home in Switzerland.

I liked the idea of being from 'somewhere else.' I do think that's inherited. My father never had a fixed sense of where home was, and for my sister and me, it is much easier not to belong than to belong.

Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.

Anywhere I hang my heart is home... it's just the closet that keeps moving.

Home is wherever I go.

I do not feel an exile from America in any sense.

An adventurer can always return home; an exile cannot. So I decided that my home would be culture.

Home is the wallpaper above the bed, the family dinner table, the church bells in the morning, the bruised shins of the playground, the small fears that come with dusk, the streets and squares and monuments and shops that constitute one's first universe.

I don't believe in a sense of home.

I am at home everywhere, and nowhere. I am never a stranger and I never quite belong.

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.

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 never had a sense of home.

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.

We make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America -- as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we're rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong.

When people ask me where my roots are, I look down at my feet, and I see the roots of my soul grasping the earth. They are here... in the Southwest... I still live in New Mexico.

I really see myself as a homegirl. Wales is my first home. London is my second home - I've been there 14 years now.