William Faulkner Quotes

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

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

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

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.

One's home is like a delicious piece of pie you order in a restaurant on a country road one cozy evening - the best piece of pie you have ever eaten in your life - and can never find again. After you leave home, you may find yourself feeling homesick, even if you have a new home that has nicer wallpaper and a more efficient dishwasher than the home in which you grew up.

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.

I get homesick.

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

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.

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

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.

You're always homesick. There's always something about home that's special. But I'm not a things person. I'm not attached to my things.

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 suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick.

Everyone comes back. It makes no difference how far we wander, we always have our country, our land, in our souls and our minds.

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.

I miss home badly sometimes. But then I remember there's nothing left to miss anymore. I feel safer here.

I never miss England.

It is not because I do not love my adopted land - it is the natural feeling of one far from home, who remembers those happy, carefree days when life flowed at full tide, without responsibility, flashing past one like the drama in a fascinating story of adventure and romance.

The first time I lived in L.A. I was too young. I really wanted to be back home in Vancouver.

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

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

If there's a heaven upon the earth, a fellow knows it when He's been away from home a week, and then gets back again.