Paulo Coelho Quotes

But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you'll never truly be at home again. What you've left behind exists only in your memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you've left behind at every stop.

Uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots.

I am not quite sure where home is right now. I do have places in London and Milan, and a house in Spain. I guess I would say home is where my mother is, and she lives in Spain.

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

L.A. really doesn't feel like home to me anymore.

At the time the world was all upside down. The American people were beginning to move around a lot. The old hometown ties had been pretty much broken. The theme of Farmer Takes a Wife appealed to people. Everybody was homesick. And it sold and sold and sold.

I loved New York, but I never quite felt like New York was my home either.

Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.

I enjoyed being in California for a while. But that's the thing about London: you can't really shake it. I've always had the impression when I was in L.A. for long periods of time that simultaneously my life was happening somewhere else, and I'm missing it.

One of my clearest impressions about India as a child was that my parents' stories would have been impossible had they stayed. Of course, such a vision was self-serving, for it made a virtue of our displacement.

I never seem to leave L.A., though I left L.A.

I don't really feel an allegiance to any of the countries I have lived in, even though I feel like part of them, and part of them is in me.

When you've moved 13 times, you lose track of where you're from.

...wherever one is, some part of oneself remains on another continent.

What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.

I don't believe I could live in Iran again. A tree, once uprooted from the earth, is very difficult to plant again.

I don't know what 'home' or 'abroad' is any more.

You can have more than one home. You can carry your roots with you, and decide where they grow.

I have emotional strings that tie me to Europe.

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

I come from no country, from no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road... all tongues and all prayers belong to me. But I belong to none of them.

I feel perhaps my heart is still in China.

I call Iran home because no matter how long I live in France, and despite the fact that I feel also French after all these years, to me the word 'home' has only one meaning: Iran. I suppose it's that way for everyone: Home is the place where one is born and raised.

Whenever you move, I think you lose your history.

Even though I live in America more, I feel like when I go to Adelaide, that's when I get to go home.