Isabelle Eberhardt Quotes

I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.

I wish I had never left England

Homesickness is universal. But Neapolitan homesickness goes back further than the accidents of domicile. It is nostalgia for love and loss themselves, a soul-sickness caused by the very idea of leaving.

Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.

We are homesick most for the places we have never known.

Some people speak and sing and walk and sit and sleep and silence their homesickness, for a long time, and to no avail. Some say that over time homesickness loses its specific content, that it starts to smolder and only then becomes all-consuming, because it’s no longer focused on a concrete home. I am one of the people who say that.

Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return brings such regret?

If you go anywhere, even paradise, you will miss your home.

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

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.

Nostalgia can be extremely powerful in the right hands: think of the intense longing in the films Andrei Tarkovsky made after he left the U.S.S.R. They wring your soul.

It's been the most astonishing year because I've been having a marvelous adventure, and yet I kind of sympathize with people who have to live in exile, because I've so missed England.

I escaped to New York, and then L.A., but when I dream of home, I still dream of my old house in Holmdel.

I don't get back to Michigan nearly as much as I'd like to.

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

'Hiraeth' means homesickness to a home to which you cannot return: the grief of the lost places of your past. I fell in love with the word and instantly connected to it. It reminded me of the days when I had left my home in Gwalior, and I had that strange pull in my stomach, and now I can so relate to this word.

Every day, I wish there was a moment when I could go back to my house and my land.

I go to many different places many times, but I miss my house constantly.

I get really homesick inside.

I do find myself missing the energy of New York more and more often as my time away from the city progresses.

I miss Boston so much and want to get back there someday.

Aberystwyth (n.) A nostalgic yearning which is in itself more pleasant than the thing being yearned for.

For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return.

I recall drinking sherry in California and dreaming of England, where I ate dalmoth and dreamed of Delhi. What is the purpose, I wonder, of all this restlessness? I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.

So I find words I never thought to speak In streets I never thought I should revisit When I left my body on a distant shore.