Glen Duncan Quotes

On the flight over to the Gulf of Mexico, I wondered about how they say you can never go home again, but maybe an equally expensive reality is how many people, regardless of how many years or miles they put between themselves and where they were born, are never truly able to leave home.

New York has given me a lot, but I still don't consider it home.

The moment you’ve uttered the exact dimensionality of your exile, you’re already turning towards home.

But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you'll never truly be at home again. What you've left behind exists only in your memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you've left behind at every stop.

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

All I ever want is to return to either Bangladesh, my motherland, or India, my adopted home.

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

Some of my songs are about the feeling you belong somewhere else. But there's also something grounding about coming from a small town.

I'm living in California but I have a place that is mine in Chile and I belong there. I am no longer an exile.

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

As someone who is displaced - I left London almost fifteen years ago to make Connecticut my home - I am drawn to stories about people who don't belong, whether physically or emotionally, and who find their families of choice in their friends.

I feel like I've never had a home, you know? I feel related to the country, to this country, and yet I don't know exactly where I fit in... There's always this kind of nostalgia for a place, a place where you can reckon with yourself.

It's strange coming back to Northern Ireland, but it feels like a home away from home.

In the poetry of immigrants, nostalgia is as common as confetti at parades or platitudes at political conventions.

I never seem to leave L.A., though I left L.A.

exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.

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

Everyone comes back. It makes no difference how far we wander, we always have our country, our land, in our souls and our minds.

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 had ambitions to set out and find, like an odyssey or going home somewhere, set out to find this home that I'd left a while back and couldn't remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way there. And encountering what I encountered on the way was how I envisioned it all. I didn't really have any ambition at all. I was born very far from where I'm supposed to be, and so, I'm on my way home, you know?

Uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots.

The farther away, the closer the home becomes.

You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right.

I've gone very far, far away, but my character keeps me close to home.

England will be home for me. It always has been and always will be.