David Foster Wallace Quotes

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

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 never had a sense of home.

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.

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

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.

If I knew I could never come back to Ireland, to England, I think I'd fall off the tree.

I never really felt like I belonged in California.

I loved New York, but I never quite felt like New York was my home either.

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.

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.

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.

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.

I don't like coming home. It keeps me from being nostalgic, which by nature I am. Even before the plane begins its descent, I find myself dreading the questions left unanswered by my childhood.

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.

Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there any more.

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

Philosophy is really nostalgia, the desire to be at home.

I've written a number of songs over the years and it's a big part of my life, this sort of tension between a longing for home and the call for the open road. It's sort of like a tug between two families. I even love to miss my home.

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

The word 'home', it seemed, once learned, was a hard one to forget.

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

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.