James Agee Quotes

Moving is easy, exciting, an adventure - when you're young. Later, not so much. I love Massachusetts, my old home. Sometimes, late at night, I even study the real estate ads in my old hometown. But it's not even a fantasy. My parents are both gone. The world I left doesn't exist anymore. Neither does the person I was.

You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.

Going home is not necessarily a wonderful experience. It always comes with a sense of loss and makes you so conscious of the inexorable passage of time.

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

It's stupid, I know, but I care. All the things that meant so much when we were young. Under the blankets late at night, listening to long-distance radio. All those things lost now or broken. Can you remember? Can you remember that feeling? Perhaps I ought to go to a doctor.

Everybody that went away suffered a broken heart. "I'm coming back some day," they all wrote. But never did. The old life was too small to fit anymore.

You can't go home again

Your old home town's so far away, but inside your head there's a record that's playing, a song called 'Hold On

The place was a familiar as breath but as far from his life now as the moon.

Nostalgia is a way of remembering people and places and things, and wishing things hadn't changed. It has a sweetness to it. Sadness is just--well--being sad.

Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.

Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we have never had, for the first involves knowledge and pleasure, the second only ignorance and pain.

There is no distance on this earth as far away as yesterday.

It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.

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

Some people speak and sing and walk and sit and sleep and silence their homesickness, for a long time, and to no avail. Some say that over time homesickness loses its specific content, that it starts to smolder and only then becomes all-consuming, because it’s no longer focused on a concrete home. I am one of the people who say that.

a kind of memory that tells us that what we're now striving for was once nearer and truer and attached to us with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance, there it was breath. After the first home the second one seems draughty and strangely sexed.

When a writer knows home in his heart, his heart must remain subtly apart from it.

Most of the lyrics are over a year old, and it doesn't feel like it's about me. Time created a distance.

The worst feeling in the world is the homesickness that comes over a man occasionally when he is at home.

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 miss England. I miss the weather. I've spent moss of the last 25 years on tour. I'm ready to come home.

You can't really go back to where you came from. I don't think any of us can.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.