Roald Dahl Quotes

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

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

I felt like I'd been misplaced in the cosmos and I belonged in Maine.

I am away from home and must always write home, even if any home of mine has long since floated away into eternity.

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

I never miss England.

I get homesick.

I am an Australian citizen, and I miss my country a great deal.

It's been the most astonishing year because I've been having a marvelous adventure, and yet I kind of sympathize with people who have to live in exile, because I've so missed England.

At the time the world was all upside down. The American people were beginning to move around a lot. The old hometown ties had been pretty much broken. The theme of Farmer Takes a Wife appealed to people. Everybody was homesick. And it sold and sold and sold.

I've never quite understood that feeling: that you arrive in a strange place, yet you want to have nothing but familiar experiences.

The only thing I can't stand is discomfort.

I could feel it in my bones, how I missed the heat of my country and the love of my family.

I miss a lot about England when I'm working away, even the slate grey skies.

I miss West Virginia very much.

Seasick," Scatty mumbled. "That's exactly what it feels like. Only worse.

There's a lot of landscape I never would have described if I hadn't been homesick. The impulse was nostalgia.

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that ofttimes hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly... perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness--the ache of the uprooted plant.

At this moment, my soul is in Lebanon, my heart in Paris, and my body in New York.

exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.

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

Home pulls. It draws you back to tell you you don't belong.

I want to go home. Then he mentally underlined the last sentence three times, rewrote it in huge letters in red ink, and circled it before putting a number of exclamation marks next to it in his mental margin.

It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere.