Marcel Proust Quotes

Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed home and thought of here? Where should we be today?

Homesickness is . . . absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. . . . You don't really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don't have, or haven't been able to find.

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

You can go home again...so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return brings such regret?

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

Even if he was happier in Asia than he'd been in Latin America, the wanderlust still worked on my father's insides like a disease. One of the most recurrent memories of my childhood is of him sitting in his armchair in the evenings, poring over atlases the way other fathers read newspapers or books.

I know what it's like to be in one place and dream of another. I also know what it's like to feel that nostalgia is a fairly useless thing because it is stasis.

If I could go anywhere in the world, that place would be home.

You fall in love differently when you are young and far from home in a seductive place. You fall in love with the very air you breathe, and the vivid colours and the unbearably sweet sensation of distance and unaccustomedness.

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

I've lived in Texas now longer than anywhere and then California and then Oklahoma, but yet Oklahoma is what I consider home.

I love my country, and it hurts not to be able to see my country, as I did for so many years. I hope that I will one day be able to live in a peaceful Colombia.

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

I am away from home and must always write home, even if any home of mine has long since floated away into eternity.

So now I'm going back again I got to get her somehow All the people we used to know They're an illusion to me now Some are mathematicians Some are carpenter's wives Don't know how it all got started I don't what they're doing with their lives But me I'm still on the road Heading for another joint We always did feel the same We just saw it from a different point of view Tangled up in Blue.

Provence is a country to which I am always returning, next week, next year, any day now, as soon as I can get on a train.

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

Every traveler has a home of his own, and he learns to appreciate it the more from his wandering.

Through my college years, topping that ridge had always given me a great sense of being home, but time had diminished the emotion and I had begun to suspect that home was less a place than an empty page.

For me, a place unvisited is like an unrequited love. A dull ache that- try as you might to think it away, to convince yourself that she really wasn't the right country for you- just won't leave you in peace.

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

My country or the stars Or my youth, what's farthest?

She went out and took a last long look at the shabby little library. She knew she would never see it again. Eyes changed after they looked at new things. If in the years to be she were to come back, her new eyes might make everything seem different from the way she saw it now. The way it was now was the way she wanted to remember it.

It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else’s house.