Carson McCullers Quotes

I miss being in my home country; here, I'm always a foreigner. America is, of course, built of people who are not from here. But going home, even just landing at Arlanda, the Stockholm airport, I think, "This is where I'm from. These people are my people."

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.

I am a Londoner and I love my home. There are many things about this country which drive me crazy, but when I am in America, I feel wrong there.

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

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.

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 missed my home - like the physicality of my home, I missed my friends and my family mostly and just hanging out and being in your home country - culturally it feels right and that is what I miss.

I can't imagine life without Poland. I find it very hard to find a place for myself in the West.

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.

... a man leaves much when he leaves his own country.

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.

Though the last glimpse of Erin with sorrow I see, Yet wherever thou art shall seem Erin to me; In exile thy bosom shall still be my home, And thine eyes make my climate wherever we roam.

Everyone comes back. It makes no difference how far we wander, we always have our country, our land, in our souls and our minds.

I was sad to leave Europe in 1890, after my student days in Germany... But then, once back in New York, I experienced an intense longing for Europe, for its vital tradition of music, theatre, art, craftsmanship... I felt bewildered and lonely. How was I to use myself?

Well, when you're an immigrant writer, or an immigrant, you're not always welcome to this country unless you're the right immigrant. If you have a Mexican accent, people look at you like, you know, where do you come from and why don't you go back to where you came from? So, even though I was born in the United States, I never felt at home in the United States. I never felt at home until I moved to the Southwest, where, you know, there's a mix of my culture with the U.S. culture, and that was why I lived in Texas for 25 years.

Everything I pick up seems to lure me away. Everything I do in my daily life begins to feel like striking wet matches. The need to travel is a mysterious force. A desire to 'go' runs through me equally with an intense desire to 'stay' at home. An equal and opposite thermodynamic principle. When I travel, I think of home and what it means. At home I'm dreaming of catching trains at night in the gray light of Old Europe, or pushing open shutters to see Florence awaken. The balance just slightly tips in the direction of the airport.

I felt a little lost as a student. At Iowa, I felt as if I had gotten into this program that was going to save me, and so I moved myself across the country for grad school and yet still didn't have a home. It was upsetting. And I know that's a common feeling.

One's home is like a delicious piece of pie you order in a restaurant on a country road one cozy evening - the best piece of pie you have ever eaten in your life - and can never find again. After you leave home, you may find yourself feeling homesick, even if you have a new home that has nicer wallpaper and a more efficient dishwasher than the home in which you grew up.

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

The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.

How does it feel, how does it feel to be without a home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone.

The only place where I felt at home, on familiar ground, was the Jewish cemetery. And yet I had never set foot in it before. Children had been forbidden to enter.

The country in which I live is not my native country, that lies elsewhere, and it must always be the center of my longings.