Hugo Weaving Quotes

I have to live within my memories, within my private universe, and continually return to China, the land where my thoughts are locked. This is a very painful kind of existence, this feeling of nowhereness.

I've always been an outsider. Even in London. If I returned to Scotland, I'd feel a complete foreigner.

South Bend is a nice town, but you know that phrase - 'I was homesick even when I was home.'

When I'm at school in the city, I don't feel particularly worldly or wise. It's only when I come back home that I remember exactly why I left.

What greater grief than the loss of one's native land.

The misfortune of a young man who returns to his native land after years away is that he finds his native land foreign; whereas the lands he left behind remain for ever like a mirage in his mind. However, misfortune can itself sow seeds of creativity. ---- Afterword to "Hothouse" Brian Aldiss

I don't believe I could live in Iran again. A tree, once uprooted from the earth, is very difficult to plant again.

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

I've spent my whole life in Chicago being asked where am I from, so that I have a sense of displacement that also is very psychologically disorienting.

I not only lived physically away from my native land, but the values and critical judgments of those closest to me became stranger and stranger.

Exile is not a time frame. Exile is an experience. It's a sentiment.

I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere.

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

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.

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

I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

Nostalgia is eternal for Americans. We are often displaced from our origins and carry anxious memories of that lost past. We fear losing our bearings.

Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.

I feel like I've never had a home, you know? I feel related to the country, to this country, and yet I don't know exactly where I fit in... There's always this kind of nostalgia for a place, a place where you can reckon with yourself.

I'm a misplaced American, but don't know where I was misplaced.

I feel like I was born in the wrong time.

Is the modern social pattern of unending change and movement the cause of two modern diseases, insecurity and dissatisfaction? How lucky Thomas Hood was to be able to write, 'I remember, I remember the house where I was born.' I don't even know what mine looked like!

I never felt truly at home in Switzerland.

I don't feel that I belong anywhere. Or rather, if there's a place I belong, I don't feel I'm there.