Alain de Botton Quotes

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.

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

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

I escaped to New York, and then L.A., but when I dream of home, I still dream of my old house in Holmdel.

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

'Hiraeth' means homesickness to a home to which you cannot return: the grief of the lost places of your past. I fell in love with the word and instantly connected to it. It reminded me of the days when I had left my home in Gwalior, and I had that strange pull in my stomach, and now I can so relate to this word.

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

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

I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.

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

Though the last glimpse of Erin with sorrow I see, Yet wherever thou art shall seem Erin to me; In exile thy bosom shall still be my home, And thine eyes make my climate wherever we roam.

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

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.

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

We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

Some people speak and sing and walk and sit and sleep and silence their homesickness, for a long time, and to no avail. Some say that over time homesickness loses its specific content, that it starts to smolder and only then becomes all-consuming, because it’s no longer focused on a concrete home. I am one of the people who say that.

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

I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick.

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

Philosophy is really nostalgia, the desire to be at home.

I never had a sense of home.

I have lived too long in foreign parts

I still want to return home whenever I get a chance.

It is more than twenty years since we left the city. This is a serious chunk of time, longer than the years we spent living there. Yet we still think of Jerusalem as our home. Not home in the sense of the place that you conduct your daily life or constantly return to. In fact, Jerusalem is our home almost against our wills. It is our home because it defines us, whether we like it or not.

I've written a number of songs over the years and it's a big part of my life, this sort of tension between a longing for home and the call for the open road. It's sort of like a tug between two families. I even love to miss my home.