Emily Dickinson Quotes

The thing about leaving New York is that you can come back.

People dreamed. People left. And they all came back.

We flew back home like swallows. 'Is it happiness that makes us so light?' Agathe asked.

When I grew up in Tasmania, you thought that London was home. You waited to go to England as soon as you graduated, in my case on a ship bound for London via Genoa.

Oh, to be in England now that April's there.

I wanted to get out of Mississippi in the worst way. Go back? What I want to go back for?

All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.

I've always been interested in arrival, and coming to a space, and even to looking back at where you were.

Farewell, farewell," said the swallow, with a heavy heart, as he left the warm countries, to fly back into Denmark. There he had a nest over the window of a house in which dwelt the writer of fairy tales. The swallow sang "Tweet, tweet," and from his song came the whole story.

...as the slow sea sucked at the shore and then withdrew, leaving the strip of seaweed bare and the shingle churned, the sea birds raced and ran upon the beaches. Then that same impulse to flight seized upon them too. Crying, whistling, calling, they skimmed the placid sea and left the shore. Make haste, make speed, hurry and begone; yet where, and to what purpose? The restless urge of autumn, unsatisfying, sad, had put a spell upon them and they must flock, and wheel, and cry; they must spill themselves of motion before winter came.

Few forms of life are so engaging as birds.

A short retirement urges a sweet return.

Looking forward to going home, I was necessarily looking backward.

Gone are the birds that were our summer guests.

Whither away, Bluebird, Whither away? The blast is chill, yet in the upper sky Thou still canst find the color of thy wing, The hue of May. Warbler, why speed, thy southern flight? ah, why, Thou, too, whose song first told us of the Spring? Whither away?

Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.

Grandmother walked up over the bare granite and thought about birds in general. It seemed to her no other creature had the same dramatic capacity to underline and perfect events - the shifts in the seasons and the weather, the changes that run through people themselves.

and the color in my eyes has gone back into the sea.

I want to look back. To look over my shoulder and see the Stop sign with huge reflective letters, pleading with Hannah. Stop!

Aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to birds.

Birds are flyin' south for winter. Here's the Weird-Bird headin' north, Wings a-flappin', beak a-chatterin', Cold head bobbin' back 'n' forth. He says, "It's not that I like ice Or freezin' winds and snowy ground. It's just sometimes it's kind of nice To be the only bird in town.

Coming back to Israel is a homecoming.

All that is within me cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River

Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.