Isak Dinesen Quotes

You carry your country with you, it's part of your baggage.

A writer without his country is nothing.

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.

My homeland is not a suitcase, and I am no traveller

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

What greater grief than the loss of one's native land.

I was born in Brooklyn, but I never lived there.

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

In the true sense one's native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.

I cannot live anywhere else except India.

I was eight when I left Sarajevo, so I didn't really know very much about my culture and it was so important for me to go back to my roots and meet the people.

Although I was always very happy in Britain, I never stopped thinking of America as home, in the fundamental sense of the term. It was where I came from, what I really understood, the base against which all else was measured.

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

I am trying to persuade my family to spend more time in China. It's no fun to be in exile. I can't even figure out the basic 26 letters, let alone operate, in English. I often feel that although I've found the sky of freedom above my head, I've lost the soil I stand on. I need to be back in my motherland, where I can find inspirations.

I have deep roots in this Oklahoma soil. It makes me proud.

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 a tried seaman when, for the first time, I set foot upon the soil of my country, and took up my residence where my people had lived for over two hundred years.

I've basically grown up in America. Even if Iran were to change, I wouldn't see myself moving there. That feeling exists for my mother and people of her generation. They say, 'Hopefully, one day.'

When we were children, we were told that we have a motherland, and that motherland was Spain. However, we have discovered later, in our lives, that as a matter of fact, we have several motherlands. And one of the greatest motherlands of all is, no doubt, Africa.

Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.

My roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up.

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?

Every time someone asks me where I'm from, I'm not sure how to answer that question... so I say I have no roots.