Bharati Mukherjee Quotes

What does 'home' really mean? Is it merely geography, where you were born? Could it include straddling two continents and cultures? Or perhaps it's a place with a spiritual magnetism - a feeling toward a culture or people - that's tough to put into words?

But, finally, I just realized a few years ago that this is where I belonged. I mean everything I had was invested here, emotionally and every other way. And the country had invested enormously in me.

I only realised why I keep living in Shepperton when I returned to China. All the people who moved there had come from places just like Shepperton, and so they built and lived in houses exactly like these. I now know I was drawn here because, on an unconscious level, Shepperton reminds me of Shanghai.

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

For me, a relationship with a place is very fundamental. When you're moving - when you're leaving your life and the place where you've lived on a semi-regular basis - you tend to connect the sense of your entire life to that place that you've left.

I'm interested in people who find themselves in places, either of their choosing or not, and who are forced to decide how best to live there. That feeling of both citizenship and exile, of always being an expatriate - with all the attendant problems and complications and delight.

You can have more than one home. You can carry your roots with you, and decide where they grow.

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

As someone who has moved around a fair amount, I wondered what it would be like to stay rooted to one place, one community.

There is something in the place where we were born that holds us always by the heart-strings.

I call Iran home because no matter how long I live in France, and despite the fact that I feel also French after all these years, to me the word 'home' has only one meaning: Iran. I suppose it's that way for everyone: Home is the place where one is born and raised.

I was born in India - but never really lived there.

I've always been really interested in how people's identities are shaped by where they come from and how they want to get away from where they come from.

I'm attached to my land in Pantelleria as if I'd inherited it. Acting is my job, Pantelleria is my home.

It's strange; when I was younger and people would ask, 'Where are you from?', I'd say, 'West Africa', which was odd because I'm obviously not African, but it was my home.

I haven't become an American! Having a house in LA is just where the house is. It's just a convenience thing living there. I carry Wales around inside me. I'd consider moving back there one day. I never really left.

I'm living in California but I have a place that is mine in Chile and I belong there. I am no longer an exile.

People are always asking me where I come from, and they're expecting me to say India, and they're absolutely right insofar as 100 percent of my blood and ancestry does come from India. Except, I've never lived one day of my life there. I can't speak even one word of its more than 22,000 dialects.

I was born in Peru, and we moved to Scotland when I was 15, but I've not lived here for a long time. But I would always say that I am Scottish, and Scotland is as close to a home as I have.

I lived in New York for seven years, although I was always in denial about it. Even though I had an apartment there, I always pretended I was just visiting. I do love New York. But I'm a Londoner at heart.

I have my husband and children near me in Rome, and I feel this is where we are temporarily belonging. But personally, all my life, I have felt the absence of a sense of history.

Ever since I was little, when I moved to Canada, Canada has been my home.

Whether I live there again or not, Seattle will always be my home.

In America, we all come from somewhere else, and we carry along some dream myth of home: a notion that something - our point of origin, our roots, the home country - is out there.

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.