Herta Muller Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

I wish I had never left England

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

Homesickness is . . . absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. . . . You don't really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don't have, or haven't been able to find.

Though the last glimpse of Erin with sorrow I see, Yet wherever thou art shall seem Erin to me; In exile thy bosom shall still be my home, And thine eyes make my climate wherever we roam.

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

until I have been able to bury my head so deep in dear London that I can forget that I have ever been away I am inconsolable.

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.

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.

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

I escaped to New York, and then L.A., but when I dream of home, I still dream of my old house in Holmdel.

'Hiraeth' means homesickness to a home to which you cannot return: the grief of the lost places of your past. I fell in love with the word and instantly connected to it. It reminded me of the days when I had left my home in Gwalior, and I had that strange pull in my stomach, and now I can so relate to this word.

I am so homesick every day of the week.

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that ofttimes hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

So I find words I never thought to speak In streets I never thought I should revisit When I left my body on a distant shore.

Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.

Your old home town's so far away, but inside your head there's a record that's playing, a song called 'Hold On

Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.

The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.