Eric Weiner Quotes

Even now that I'm married and 28, my room's still intact the way it was when I went to high school.

I've still got the same friends that I grew up with, I still go to the same places that I used to go to when I was younger, and it's just a very special place to me. I'm still very proud to call Iowa home.

I suppose any person who's played somewhere for a certain amount of time and then has the opportunity to go back and just reminisce a little bit, maybe it holds a different feeling than some of the other places.

So, ask the travelled inhabitant of any nation, in what country on earth would you rather live? — Certainly, in my own, where are all my friends, my relations, and the earliest and sweetest affections and recollections of my life. Which would be your second choice? France.

I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods.

You get attached to places, you know. Like people, I suppose.

All that you've loved is all you own

There's always something about home that's special.

I am certain that over the course of your own life, you have noticed that people's rooms reflect their personalities. In my room, for instance, I have gathered a collection of objects that are important to me, including a dusty accordion on which I can play a few sad songs, a large bundle of notes on the activities of the Baudelaire orphans, and a blurry photograph, taken a very long time ago, of a woman whose name is Beatrice. These are items that are very precious and dear to me.

Then I turned the page and at the top it said THINGS I MISS ABOUT M and there was a list of 15 things, and the first was THE WAY HE HOLDS THINGS. I did not understand how you can miss the way somebody holds things.

Marya pinned out her childhood like a butterfly. She considered it the way a mathematician considers an equation.

We often live in the past a lot more than we probably realize.

Romantic souvenirs had a way of attaching themselves to one when one wanted to move on, but they were not to be taken seriously.

I would really rather feel bad in Maine than feel good anywhere else

I mean, it's not surprising, really. Once you love something, you always love it in some way. You have to. It's, like, part of you for good.

Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.

Home is the wallpaper above the bed, the family dinner table, the church bells in the morning, the bruised shins of the playground, the small fears that come with dusk, the streets and squares and monuments and shops that constitute one's first universe.

Heimat. The word mean home in German, the place where one was born. But the term also conveys a subtler nuance, a certain tenderness. One's Heimat is not merely a matter of geography; it is where one's heart lies.

It was for the sake of what had been, rather than what was.

It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.

The apartment was entirely, was only, for her: a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked… Her self, then, was represented in her books; her times in her records; and the rest of the room she thought of as a pure, blank slate.

It’s hard to throw away history. It was like you were throwing away a part of yourself.

Going back to California is not like going back to Vermont, or Chicago; Vermont and Chicago are relative constants, against which one measures one's own change. All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears.

For women live much more in the past...they attach themselves to places.

All those moments, those memories. Everything that we are, compressed in just two or three kilos of paper — the weight of a human heart.