T. S. Eliot Quotes

I am away from home and must always write home, even if any home of mine has long since floated away into eternity.

If I knew I could never come back to Ireland, to England, I think I'd fall off the tree.

I wish I had never left England

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.

Every day, I wish there was a moment when I could go back to my house and my land.

exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.

There is always something to miss, no matter where you are.

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

When I thinkof my own native land, In a moment I seem to be there; But alas! recollection at hand Soon hurries me back to despair.

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.

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

I feel more and more the time wasted that is not spent in Ireland.

She is Cuba. If you want to love her, you have to be with her, but you can't be with her in her current state. It's the point of view of all exiles - you have to leave the thing you cherish most.

Mexico is only a memory of childhood safety.

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

It's been the most astonishing year because I've been having a marvelous adventure, and yet I kind of sympathize with people who have to live in exile, because I've so missed England.

The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.

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

I sing 'Beirut' for what the city is for me, but I am also singing as an exile.

I left my rhythm back in Denver.

An exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss.

No magic. I do believe you might have taken it all with you when you went away.

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

Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.

I know that something dies when i give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia.