David Whyte Quotes

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

So many of my films involve houses or homes that have been abandoned. People trying to get back home. That's an idea that I keep dealing with.

Home pulls. It draws you back to tell you you don't belong.

It's strange coming back to Northern Ireland, but it feels like a home away from home.

On the flight over to the Gulf of Mexico, I wondered about how they say you can never go home again, but maybe an equally expensive reality is how many people, regardless of how many years or miles they put between themselves and where they were born, are never truly able to leave home.

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

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

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.

All exiles carry a map within them that points the way homeward.

If I come back, it will be a place, but it won't be a home any longer.

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

Do you ever want to go home?' I asked Paul. He brushed an ash from my face. 'It's the century of the displaced person,' he said. 'You can never go home.

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.

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

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

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

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.

I'm living in California but I have a place that is mine in Chile and I belong there. I am no longer an exile.

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

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

I feel like I've never had a home, you know? I feel related to the country, to this country, and yet I don't know exactly where I fit in... There's always this kind of nostalgia for a place, a place where you can reckon with yourself.

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

In the poetry of immigrants, nostalgia is as common as confetti at parades or platitudes at political conventions.

I feel like I've spent a lot of time imagining home and thinking about a dream-like place, as opposed to a real place, because that's not what I was able to do, meaning go home or be home.

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