Homesick Quotes & Sayings

Name me no names for my disease,
With uninforming breath;
I tell you I am none of these,
But homesick unto death - Homesick for hills that I had known,
For brooks that I had crossed,
... Before I met this flesh and bone
And followed and was lost ... .And though they break my heart at last,
Yet name no name of ills.
Say only, Here is where he passed,
Seeking again those hills. — Witter Bynner

Homesick we are, and always, for another
And different world. — Vita Sackville-West

Many people are shrinking from the future and from participation in the movement toward a new, expanded reality. And, like homesick travelers abroad, they are focusing their anxieties on home. The reasons are not far to seek. We are at a turning point in human history ... We could turn our attention to the problems that going to the Moon certainly will not solve ... But I think this would be fatal to our future ... A society that no longer moves forward does not merely stagnate; it begins to die. — Margaret Mead

All my stories take place on the West Coast - not the beach, but smaller inland towns. I feel homesick, and I find inspiration in capturing that. — Adrian Tomine

I have never really got used to being on this earth. Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, they would have become extinct long ago. How could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was made to contain us. — John Banville

My mother and I were born in Mieres, Asturias, the most beautiful region you'll ever see in Europe and the home of Cabrales, a great blue cheese made in the Asturian mountains. When I was young, we moved to Barcelona. Whenever my mother was homesick for Asturias, she'd eat a little piece of Cabrales to bring her closer to Mieres. — Jose Andres

When you feel homesick,' he said, 'just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go. — Donna Tartt

I am alone in the world, Dolores, and I am homesick for my own kind. — Kate DiCamillo

I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree. — William Butler Yeats

You know, I tried not to think of this place. I tried to let it go. To leave it behind. But it always came back to me, in my dreams. I'd dream about these details, these objects and people and places I'd left behind, and I'd wake up crying. — Danzy Senna

I'm not like the rest of you; I never made any plans about what I'd do when I grew up; I never thought of being married, as you did. I couldn't seem to imagine myself anything but stupid little Beth, trotting about at home, of no use anywhere but there. I never wanted to go away, and the hard part now is leaving you all. I'm not afraid, but it seems as if I should be homesick for you even in heaven. — Louisa May Alcott

As I speak, blood is coursing through our bodies. As it moves away from the heart it marches to a 2/4 or 4/4 beat and it's arterial blood, reoxygenated, assertive, active, progressive, optimistic. When it reaches our extremities and turns home
the heart
well, it's nostalgic, venous blood (as in veins), it's tired, wavelike, rising and falling, fighting against gravity and inertia, and it moves to the beat of a waltz, a 3/4 beat, a little homesick now, and full of longing. — Mary Ruefle

If we only had eyes to see and ears to hear and wits to understand, we would know that the Kingdom of God in the sense of holiness, goodness, beauty is as close as breathing and is crying out to born both within ourselves and within the world; we would know that the Kingdom of God is what we all of us hunger for above all other things even when we don't know its name or realize that it's what we're starving to death for. The Kingdom of God is where our best dreams come from and our truest prayers. We glimpse it at those moments when we find ourselves being better than we are and wiser than we know. We catch sight of it when at some moment of crisis a strength seems to come to us that is greater than our own strength. The Kingdom of God is where we belong. It is home, and whether we realize it or not, I think we are all of us homesick for it. — Frederick Buechner

Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground. — Judith Thurman

What do you want me to say?" he asked, his voice sharp and moody.
"That I had a moment of weakness when I saw it?That for an instant I felt the pang of being homesick? Yeah, I did. There, you now know the Dark-Hunter who has no soul has a heart. Are you happy? "
"I already knew you had a heart. "
He stopped at a red light and looked at her. A fierce frown creased his brow as if he were trying to figure her out.
"Believe it or not," she continued,
"it shows in everything you do. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Wherever I live, I shall feel homesick for Tibet. I often think I can still hear the cries of wild geese and cranes and the beating of their wings as they fly over Lhasa in the clear, cold moonlight. My heartfelt wish is that my story may create some understanding for a people whose will to live in peace and freedom has won so little sympathy from an indifferent world. — Heinrich Harrer

Beauty in the European sense has always had a premeditated quality to it. We've always had an aesthetic intention and a long-range plan. That's what enabled western man to spend decades building a Gothic cathedral or a Renaissance piazza. The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independent of human designt, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with with a sudden wondrous poetry ... Sabina was very much attracted by the alien quality of New York's beauty. Fran found it intriguing but frightening; it made him feel homesick for Europe. — Milan Kundera

It was possible to be homesick for a time, and to be lonely for the only other person who could recall it. — Robin Hobb

She explained to him that she had been homesick, and that Father Flood had inscribed her on the course as a way of making her busy, and how studying in the evening made her feel happy, or as happy as she had been since she had left home. — Colm Toibin

Africa.
That bird came from Africa.
But you mustn't cry for that bird, Paulie, because after a while it forgot about how the veldt smelled at noonday, and the sounds of the wildebeests at the waterhole, and the high acidic smell of the ieka-ieka trees in the great clearing north of the Big road. After awhile it forgot the cerise color of the sun dying behind Kilimanjaro. After awhile it only knew the muddy, smogged-out sunsets of Boston, that was all it remembered and all it wanted to remember. After awhile it didn't want to go back anymore, and if someone took it back and set it free it would only crouch in one place, afraid and hurting and homesick in two unknown and terribly ineluctable directions until something came along and killed it.
'Oh Africa, oh, shit,' he said in a trembling voice. — Stephen King

There's just something about the way he sings. It makes me think of when it snows outside, and the fire is warm, and Podo is telling us a story while you're cooking, and there's no place I'd rather be
but for some reason I still feel ... homesick. — Andrew Peterson

It's hard being a man. Have you ever thought about that? Anything that's bothering them, men think they have to hide it. They think they should seem in charge, in control; they don't dare show their true feelings. No matter if they're hurting or desperate or stricken with grief, if they're heartsick or they're homesick or some huge dark guilt is hanging over them or they're about to fail big-time at something - 'Oh, I'm okay,' they say. 'Everything's just fine.' They're a whole lot less free than women are, when you think about it. — Anne Tyler

I reluctantly left the series because a) my age. I'm 68 tomorrow and time is very precious for me to spend time at home with my family and especially with the grandchildren. They're aged 7 and 5. After three years I became homesick for my home. — Richard Briers

What is it which makes a man and a woman know that they, of all other men and women in the world, belong to each other? Is it no more than chance and meeting? no more than being alive together in the world at the same time? Is it only a curve of the throat, a line of the chin, the way the eyes are set, a way of speaking? Or is it something deeper and stranger, something beyond meeting, something beyond chance and fortune? Are there others, in other times of the world, whom we should have loved, who would have loved us? Is there, perhaps, one soul among all others
among all who have lived, the endless generations, from world's end to world's end
who must love us or die? And whom we must love, in turn
whom we must seek all our lives long
headlong and homesick
until the end? — Robert Nathan

We need to be homesick for heaven. Though we have never been there, we still have something God has built within us that gives us a certain homesickness, a desire to be there. — Greg Laurie

Look, Mrs. McGillicuddy, it's not my fault your son jumped out a dorm room window on Christmas eve. I've written over fifty books as a Columbia professor, all right? You don't do that by holding hands with every at-risk undergraduate who says he's homesick, or he's turning gay, or the dog ate his term paper. I write about Lincoln, and freedom, and great ideas. I don't always have time for students. It's like Dean Martin used to say: if you want to talk, go to a priest.
Hey
what's the gun for? — Eric Foner

A rabbit sneeze on the morning breeze sets homesick hearts aglow sitting with his rumps in a chicory clump and longing for a nice plump doe. — Richard Adams

One's home is like a delicious piece of pie you order in a restaurant on a country road one cozy evening - the best piece of pie you have ever eaten in your life - and can never find again. After you leave home, you may find yourself feeling homesick, even if you have a new home that has nicer wallpaper and a more efficient dishwasher than the home in which you grew up. — Daniel Handler

And I am homesick After mine own kind that know, and feel And have some breath for beauty and the arts. — Ezra Pound

It's a world full of terror and beauty (here her writing became so small Meggie could hardly make it out) and I could always understand why Dustfinger felt homesick for it.
The last sentence worried Meggie, but when she looked anxiously at her mother, Teresa smiled and reached for her hand. I was far, far more homesick for you two, she wrote on the palm of it, and Meggie closed her fingers over the words as if to hold them fast. She read them again and again on the long drive back to Elinor's house, and it was many days before they faded. — Cornelia Funke

christmas is a time when you get homesick-even when you're home. — Carol Nelson

It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there. — Don DeLillo

He got up and stalked out of the house, slamming the screen door.
My mother explained.
He has a gentle heart, she said. It is simply that he is homesick and such a large man. — William, Saroyan

When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they've never had, and never will have — E.W. Howe

I came into Chicago in winter - I'd never been so cold in my life! I was very homesick, and a poor student at that time. America seemed so different and so filled with amazing things - and almost all of them were out of my reach. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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

I feel homesick for this London I left behind. — Jennifer Niven

It really gets on my goat that people keep quoting Dorothea Mackellar's 'My Country' as proof that there is no such thing as climate change. A poem written more than 100 years ago by a homesick 19 year old versus an ever-increasing body of refereed scientific thought ... hmm, hard to know which way to jump, really. — Judy Horacek

Cricket's voice broke through Thomas's memory. He was reading a letter, most likely from his mother. He was trying hard to hide it, but he was tearing up.
"Captain I don't want to be here," was all he could choke out. Thomas reached over and gave Cricket's shoulder a tight squeeze. — Jessica Fortunato

Life was full of adventure: I learnt the smell of danger - I've got a sixth sense for it now. We're homesick for it, some of us; it's called the 'Afghan syndrome'. — Svetlana Alexievich

At the time the world was all upside down. The American people were beginning to move around a lot. The old hometown ties had been pretty much broken. The theme of Farmer Takes a Wife appealed to people. Everybody was homesick. And it sold and sold and sold. — John Gould

Don't think I am not homesick for America. I say 'homesick' advisedly because I am a man with two homes - America, which gave me hospitality for many happy years, and where my daughter was born; and my native England. — Leslie Howard

You scour these Chinatowns of the mind, translating them
like sutras Xuan Zhang fetched from India, testing ways
return might be possible against these homesick inventions,
trace the traveller's alien steps across borders, and in between
discover how transit has a way of lasting, the way these Chinatowns
grew out of not knowing whether to return or to stay, and then became home. — Boey Kim Cheng

Don't you realize that the sea is the home of water? All water is off on a journey unless it's in the sea, and it's homesick, and bound to make its way home someday. — Zora Neale Hurston

If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant ones
Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water. — W. H. Auden

I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal, like any other which sought its meat from God. But now I really was happy, for I had learnt that man is a monstrosity. I had been right in feeling all things as odd, for I myself was at once worse and better than all things. The optimist's pleasure was prosaic, for it dwelt on the naturalness of everything; the Christian pleasure was poetic, for it dwelt on the unnaturalness of everything in the light of the supernatural. The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring. The knowledge found out and illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. I knew now why grass had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could feel homesick at home. — G.K. Chesterton

A girl from Pittsburgh was a good thing, like an anchor. Every homesick traveler should have one. — Kelly Link

He felt homesick for places he had never been. He missed hearts he had never loved. — Pete Wentz

Heart thoughts are profound, hindsight aches and hope is obscure. I'm craving a great adventure
one that leads me back home. — Donna Lynn Hope

When I was a kid, I was so homesick at all times. — Kendall Jenner

Our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home. — Karen Blixen

I get very homesick, but otherwise it's a great privilege to get to travel for work. — Jesse Eisenberg

Sometimes he felt like he'd been gone his whole life
in exile, away from the place he was supposed to be, and that, soldier-like, he was pining to be returned. Homesick for a place he'd never been. — Gillian Flynn

I better stop thinking in this manner, or before I know where I am I'll be bursting into tears, and it's a nice thing getting homesick before you even leave a place at all, so it is. — Walter Macken

It dawned on me that no person is as poetically homesick as someone who has come to New York for the first time and glimpsed a small vestige of her home state. — Suzanne Rindell

One is always homesick for places where one came to grief. — Catherynne M Valente

Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. I'm not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don't have to be like anyone else. I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me. — Hugo Hamilton

The spectacle of the constabulary in the terminal with automatic weapons slung on their shoulders also made me homesick, confirming I was again in a country with its malnourished neck under a dictator's loafer. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I got the travel bug when I was quite young. My parents took me and my sisters out of school and we travelled all over Europe. It was an eye-opening experience and, although I love Norway, I also enjoy visiting new countries. I don't get homesick. — Magnus Carlsen

I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful. — Henry David Thoreau

I would have loved to have cracked America. When I tried, I got homesick. Then, when I was in New York, my nanna died, and I just wanted to come home. — Cilla Black

He breathed in. He breathed out.
He forgot how to exhale when he wasn't at home. — Maggie Stiefvater

One thing I wish I'd done differently in my career is insist on having friends or family on tour. I was really young when I travelled the world with Eternal, and I was always homesick. — Louise Nurding

His boredom was like a nostalgia for the whole world. He was homesick for everywhere but here. — Christopher Isherwood

When you get homesick, it's not something missing, it's something present, a visit. People and places from far away arrive and keep you company for a while. — Erri De Luca

And so they played some of the world's loveliest piano music - the exiled homesick girl, the humiliated, tired old man. Not properly. Better than that. — Eva Ibbotson

You can hate a place with all your heart and soul and still be homesick for it. — Joseph Mitchell

The hardest thing about moving to California from Connecticut was just missing my family. If I went back, it would be just because I was homesick. — Kevin Nealon

For some reason, she thought of how the old people wept when they played fado music at the annual Portuguese Festival. Saudade , her great-aunt Del called it: homesick music. But according to her father, the emotion was about more than place. It was a profound longing for everything that was lost and would never be regained. — Patry Francis

But to be a parent is to live in the past-present-future all at once. It is to hug your children and be intensely aware of how much smaller they felt last year ... even as you wonder how much bigger they will feel the next. It is to be a time-shifter, to marvel at the budding of their intellect, their verbal dexterity, their sense of humor ... at the same time rewinding and fast-forwarding ... to when they were younger, to when they'll be older. It is to experience longing for the here and now, which I know sounds flaky - sort of like complaining about being homesick when you're already home - but can happen, trust me, when you live in multiple time zones all at once. — Youngme Moon

I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick. — Joseph Conrad

Chinese were bornwith an accumulated wisdom, a natural sophistication, an intelligent naivete, and unless they were transplanted too young, these qualities ripened in them ... If ever I am homesick for China, now that I am home in my own country, it is when I discover here no philosophy. Our people have opinions and creeds and prejudices and ideas but as yet no philosophy. — Pearl S. Buck

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. — John Cheever

How many people have you made homesick for God? — Oswald Chambers

I don't especially like to travel, not the way many people do. I know many people that love to go to far-off and different places, and I've never been like that. I seem to get homesick as quickly as a child. — Elizabeth Strout

I'm really happy you're doing this," she says. "But I'm going to warn you, I might miss you a lot and I might sound sad when you call, but don't get homesick. I'll be fine. I promise. I'm sad that I won't get to see you as often, but I'm even happier that you're taking this step. And I promise that's all I'm going to say about it. I love you and I'm proud of you — Colleen Hoover

After I've been in America for a while, I get homesick for Scotland. — Billy Boyd

Now that he was navigating, his celestial mood was shattered. Wild, animal thirst for life, mixed with homesick longing for the free airs and the sights and smells of earth-for grass and meat and beer and tea and the human voice-awoke in him. — C.S. Lewis

It was not just the drink, though, that was making me happy, but the tenderness of things, the simple goodness of the world. This sunset, for instance, how lavishly it was laid on, the clouds, the light on the sea, that heartbreaking, blue-green distance, laid on, all of it, as if to console some lost suffering waybarer. I have never really got used to being on this earth. Somethings I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, they would have become extinct long ago. How could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was meant to contain us? — John Banville

When you go from the fake New Orleans of Disneyland to the real one, where the captain of the paddle-wheel steamer says it is possible to see alligators on the banks of the river, and then you don't see any, you risk feeling homesick for Disneyland.
-'City of Robots',1986 — Umberto Eco

Anyway, camp is weird. It might take a couple of days to like it, or sometimes it hits you when you're home at the end of the summer, and you're, like, 'Wow, that was amazing. I'm reverse homesick - I'm camp-sick.' And then you can't stop thinking about it and feeling this very real feeling, you know? — Stacy Davidowitz

You live overseas, you see these exotic places and you want to know about them. But, weirdly, it also made me homesick for all these very prosaic places in America. — Ken Jennings

If it is possible to be homesick for the world, even places one has never been and knows one will never see, this book is the child of such homesickness. — Huston Smith

I can get on with all different sorts of people, and I never feel homesick, particularly, or I've never felt kind of patriotic towards any one country. — Andy Serkis

You can never give another person that which you have found, but you can make him homesick for what you have. — Warren W. Wiersbe

I'm homesick all the time. I miss my animals. I miss my family. I miss my friends. — Brittany Howard

I'm always homesick for the journey," I had once written in ink speckled script, adding almost as an afterthought, " ... no matter what it may hold. — S.C. Barrus

Ter refused to ride buses. The people depressed him, sitting there. He liked Greyhound stations though. We used to go to the ones in San Francisco and Oakland. Mostly Oakland, on San Pablo Avenue. Once he told me he loved me because I was like San Pablo Avenue. He was like the Berkeley dump. I wish there was a bus to the dump. We went there when we got homesick for New Mexico. It is stark and windy and gulls soar like nighthawks in the desert. You can see the sky all around you and above you. Garbage trucks thunder through dust-billowing roads. Gray dinosaurs. — Lucia Berlin

We are homesick for places, we are reminded of places, it is the sounds and smells and sights of places which haunt us and against which we often measure our present. — Alan Gussow

If something hurts me, the hurts I suffered back then come back to me, and when I feel guilty, the feelings of guilt return; if I yearn for something today, or feel homesick, I feel the yearnings and homesickness from back then. The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. — Bernhard Schlink

In the spring of 1929, I returned to the United States. I was homesick for this country. I had learned in my student days a great deal about the new physics. I wanted to pursue this myself, to explain it, and to foster its cultivation. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

You remember how homesick I used to get, and what long talks we used to have coming from school? We've someway always felt alike about things."
"Yes, that's it; we've liked the same things and we've liked them together, without anybody else knowing. And we've had good times, hunting for Christmas trees and going for ducks and making our plum wine together every year. We've never either of us had any other close friend. And now
— Willa Cather

She was right. The purebred girls were making mistakes on purpose, in order to give us an advantage. 'King me,' I growled, out of turn. 'I say king me!' and Felicity meekly complied. Beulah pretended not to mind when we got frustrated with the oblique, fussy movement from square to square and shredded the board to ribbons. I felt sorry for them. I wondered what it would be like to be bred in captivity, and always homesick for a dimly sensed forest, the trees you've never seen. — Karen Russell

The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. — Anne Tyler

Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war. — Loren Eiseley

Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it. — John Updike

Homesick? For a village in the middle of nowhere? Where there's no work and everyone — Susanne O'Leary

No one has yet believed in God and the kingdom of God, no one has yet heard about the realm of the resurrected, and not been homesick from that hour, waiting and looking forward joyfully to being released from bodily existence. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

His body heat seeps into my side, as does his sweet smell that makes me homesick for a home I've never had. — Lindy Zart

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