Edward Norton Quotes

The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone. The woods that I loved as a young adult are gone. The woods that most recently I walked in are not gone, but they're full of bicycle trails.

Homesickness is . . . absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. . . . You don't really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don't have, or haven't been able to find.

Many nights, I longed for home. But it occurred to me as I struggled for a feeling of comfort and safety: I have no idea where home is.

It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else’s house.

It was not a triumphal return. Home, as I had known it, was gone.

I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now--only that place where the books are kept.

Fog rolled in like a form of sorrow. To live exiled from a place you have known intimately is to experience sensory deprivation. A wide-awake coma. ... The sea was a memory bank into which everything fell and was lost. I dove in but came out empty-handed.

It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

There is always something to miss, no matter where you are.

I don't think you can ever return, really.

The return to a favorite novel is generally tied up with changes in oneself that must be counted as improvements, but have the feel of losses. It is like going back to a favorite house, country, person; nothing is where it belongs, including one's heart.

She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.

Our exile organizations have been our way of replacing the cities and villages we have lost.

I cry for everything I abandoned and because I, too, have been left behind -- by Alex, by my mom, by time that has cut through our worlds and separated us.

I could come back to America..to die..but never, never to live.

Father's Day makes me wish I could talk to my Dad just one more time, instead of all the time.

I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.

In the long, sleepless watches of the night, A gentle face the face of one long dead Looks at me from the wall, where round its head The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.

Have you ever been homesick for someplace that doesn't actually exist anymore? Someplace that exists only in your mind?

It was a terrible psychic blow... Ebbets Field was replaced by a housing project. How could a father tell his son where Duke Snider used to hit one? Point out Apartment 5Q?

I'm missing some people, you know, and this is not nostalgia. I miss them. This is melancholy.

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

We have converted huge swaths of land and ocean into human habitats where we live and grow food and harvest energy. But there's been a sea change in the past century.

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