Carson McCullers Quotes

I go to many different places many times, but I miss my house constantly.

I had spent my whole life feeling homesick. The only difference between the two of us was that I didn't know what or where home was.

I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.

We are homesick most for the places we have never known.

And I think a lot of us have fantasies of going back to where we're from, or when we do go back we're so nostalgic about it.

I have to live within my memories, within my private universe, and continually return to China, the land where my thoughts are locked. This is a very painful kind of existence, this feeling of nowhereness.

I'm living in L.A. but my heart's in Vancouver.

L.A. really doesn't feel like home to me anymore.

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

Nostalgia is eternal for Americans. We are often displaced from our origins and carry anxious memories of that lost past. We fear losing our bearings.

I keep thinking I'm going to miss it back in Los Angeles. But I don't. The only thing I miss is driving out in the desert in the Southwest.

I don't get back to Michigan nearly as much as I'd like to.

South Bend is a nice town, but you know that phrase - 'I was homesick even when I was home.'

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.

I am very happy with my life, but seven or eight months a year, I am away from home. I want to go home - that's the truth.

I've got to confess... I do feel slightly like I've been born in the wrong time.

I miss Boston so much and want to get back there someday.

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

Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere, for wherever one is some part of oneself remains on another continent.

I don't hate it here," she said automatically. Surprising herself, she realized that as much as she'd been trying to convince herself otherwise, she was telling the truth. "It's just that I don't belong here." He gave her a meloncholy smile. "If it's any consolation, when I was growing up, I didn't feel like I belonged here, either. I dreamed about going to New York. But it's strange, because when I finally escaped this place, I ended up missing it more than I thought I would. There's something about the ocean that just calls to me.

Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.

I have lived too long in foreign parts

I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.

Philosophy is really homesickness.

The misfortune of a young man who returns to his native land after years away is that he finds his native land foreign; whereas the lands he left behind remain for ever like a mirage in his mind. However, misfortune can itself sow seeds of creativity. ---- Afterword to "Hothouse" Brian Aldiss