Camila Mendes Quotes

Homeland is something one becomes aware of only through its loss.

Growing up, I never really felt like anything was my own. I moved a lot, and I never belonged anywhere.

I'm someone who is very sentimental and nostalgic and attached to the homes I lived in, and I think moving is a traumatic experience.

When I look at my own work, I see love, loss, and loneliness. Part of it might be that I was an army brat. I moved around all the time. There was a sense of nothing being permanent.

When I became conscious of being a person, when I was very small, I knew that I was from Indiana, but I had never seen Indiana. I was born there, but we moved when I was, like, a year old. I always had a sense of a place that was far away from where I was. I would research it and find out about it and I remember on Christmas morning I used to always call Indiana to find out what the weather was like; to see if it was snowing or not.

(...) Since I was a kid." "Which you refer to as 'back when you were happy.'" "Right.

I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now--only that place where the books are kept.

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

Every thought should recall the ruin of a smile.

She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.

I feel saddened when people who have major friendships or marriages wind up on the outs. Because I think you lose a little piece of yourself.

The times that were most fun seemed always to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realized how utterly gone she was.

Remembering the ball became for Emma a daily occupation. Every time Wednesday came round, she told herself when she woke up: 'Ah! One week ago...two weeks ago...three weeks ago, I was there!' And, little by little, in her memory, the faces all blurred together; she forgot the tunes of the quadrilles; no longer could she so clearly picture the liveries and the rooms; some details disappeared, but the yearning remained.

I cry for everything I abandoned and because I, too, have been left behind -- by Alex, by my mom, by time that has cut through our worlds and separated us.

I felt more alone that week than any. Sometimes I'd feel a body lying next to me like an amputee feels a phantom limb. All I did was think about Jennie Gerhardt and Alice Quinn and all the decades of people I had known. The more I thought, the more I felt like crying. Life seemed so sweet and so sad, and so hard to let go of in the end. But hey, man, every day is a brand new deal, right? Just keep on working and something's bound to turn up.

I hate to see it go, I'll tell you that. I played here all my life. Eighteen years I played here and I'm sorry to see it go.

We never do anything consciously for the last time without sadness of heart.

When I left Merle was wearing a bungalow apron and rolling pie crust. She came to the door wiping her hands on the apron and kissed me on the mouth and began to cry and ran back into the house, leaving the doorway empty [...] I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again. (p. 262)

And nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.

The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts.

I miss us, too. I always have, and probably always will

If only…the saddest words in the English language.

What stays with me most is a general sense of loss, unease, and longing for the past that cannot be relieved.

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