John Cheever Quotes

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.

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

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

I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.

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

The worst feeling in the world is the homesickness that comes over a man occasionally when he is at home.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams.

I wish I had never left England

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

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.

Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere, for wherever one is some part of oneself remains on another continent.

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

Sittin' here resting my bones, this loneliness won't leave me alone. Two thousand miles I roam, just to make this dock my home. I'm just gon' sit at the dock of the bay, watching the tide roll away. Sittin' on the dock of the bay, wastin' time.

I have lived too long in foreign parts

We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, 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?

I used to suffer from a lot of regret while touring. Regret at having to leave certain places, people and situations, or just a beautiful day.

I get homesick.

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

I miss England. I miss the weather. I've spent moss of the last 25 years on tour. I'm ready to come home.

Exile is not a time frame. Exile is an experience. It's a sentiment.

I've always been an outsider. Even in London. If I returned to Scotland, I'd feel a complete foreigner.

I'm homesick all the time. I miss my animals. I miss my family. I miss my friends.

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.