Stewart O'Nan Quotes

When you finally go back to your old home, you find it wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood.

L.A. really doesn't feel like home to me anymore.

The place of my birth, and residence for nearly sixteen years, in the early part of my life, became endeared to my feelings and affections; and more especially so after I had quitted it for an unknown place, and to associate with strangers.

You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old rooms, the world you've made for yourself ceases to be real. Everything seems to crumble. Anyone who's been sent away to boarding school can understand that.

America has always been a special place for me, since my youth.

I had spent my whole life feeling homesick. The only difference between the two of us was that I didn't know what or where home was.

I grew up in Florida, and I wanted to go home and I couldn't. I didn't have the money. The book [The Tiger Rising] was a way to go home.

[After my mother died, I had a feeling that was] not unlike the homesickness that always filled me for the first few days when I went to stay at my grandparents'' house, and even, I was stunned to discover, during the first few months of my freshman year at college. It was not really the home my mother had made that I yearned for. But I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life.

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.

You really can't go home again. Sometimes, that's a good thing. Sometimes, when you try, you find out that home isn't really there anymore... but that it wasn't only in your head before. Home actually existed. Home wasn't just a dream. Sometimes, that's the best thing of all.

I never had a sense of home.

That night I looked up at those same stars, but I didn't want any of those things. I didn't want Egypt, or France, or far-flung destinations. I just wanted to go back to my life from my childhood, just to visit it, and touch it, and to convince myself that yes, it had been real.

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 everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?

You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right.

But why had he always felt so strongly the magnetic pull of home, why had he thought so much about it and remembered it with such blazing accuracy, if it did not matter, and if this little town, and the immortal hills around it, was not the only home he had on earth? He did not know. All that he knew was that the years flow by like water, and that one day men come home again.

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.

And I think a lot of us have fantasies of going back to where we're from, or when we do go back we're so nostalgic about it.

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

In the true sense one's native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.

I grew up in a country that I thought was special. And it was.

When memories fade, can one ever really return home?

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

Aledo will always be home to me because I spent the first 27 years of my life there - it's such a special place - and because of the experiences I had there, I've become the person I am today.

Whenever I'm in Glasgow I go and stand outside the front of the house I grew up in, which is in Mount Vernon.