Mary McCarthy Quotes

What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier? Each moment seems split in two: melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land.

My dad constantly tells me I should calm down, but I feel so sad when I see places I've known since I was a child closing. I burst out crying when a local pharmacy closed the other day; it's just going to become a shop that nobody has much of a need for. But I am trying to move with the times.

This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.

I drug your ghost across the country, and we plotted out my death. Every city and memory we whispered "Here is where you rest." Well I was determined in Chicago but I dug my teeth into my knees And I settled for a telephone, sang into your machine: "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.

Inside of us, there's a continual autumn. Our leaves fall and are blown out over the water.

You really can't go home again. Sometimes, that's a good thing. Sometimes, when you try, you find out that home isn't really there anymore... but that it wasn't only in your head before. Home actually existed. Home wasn't just a dream. Sometimes, that's the best thing of all.

I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you actually left them.

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

So that's what I'm here to become. And suddenly, this word fills me with a brand of sadness I haven't felt since childhood. The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer. When the fireflies are gone, the ponds have dried up and the plants are wilted, weary from being so green.

To be honest, I think I'd become a bit selfish with memories of my father. I wanted to hug them close to me.

The end of anything is not fun because there's a nostalgia to it and everything else. Even the end of a bad relationship can feel so, so, so sad.

You can't really go back to where you came from. I don't think any of us can.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

There is something in the pang of change More than the heart can bear, Unhappiness remembering happiness.

I wish I had never left England

I always make a distinction between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is genuine - you mourn things that actually happened.

Going home is not necessarily a wonderful experience. It always comes with a sense of loss and makes you so conscious of the inexorable passage of time.

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.

I'm not even sure that I want to go back... The Zimbabwe that I really loved, the Zimbabwe that I grew up in, just isn't there anymore, and I'm not sure about the country that has replaced it.

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

Three months before he died, I began to steal things from my father's house. I wandered around barefoot and slipped objects into my pockets. I took blush, toothpaste, two chipped finger bowls in celadon blue, a bottle of nail polish, a pair of worn patent-leather ballet slippers, and four faded white pillowcases the color of old teeth.

It's stupid, I know, but I care. All the things that meant so much when we were young. Under the blankets late at night, listening to long-distance radio. All those things lost now or broken. Can you remember? Can you remember that feeling? Perhaps I ought to go to a doctor.

I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.

How important things had become, now that they were gone! I felt a sudden panic that I would soon forget everything.