Colm Toibin Quotes

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

I've always been an outsider. Even in London. If I returned to Scotland, I'd feel a complete foreigner.

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

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

Well, probably having to be away from home. When I come back I kind of feel like there's a routine going on that I'm not a part of, so that can be difficult.

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

So many of my films involve houses or homes that have been abandoned. People trying to get back home. That's an idea that I keep dealing with.

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

The worst feeling in the world is the homesickness that comes over a man occasionally when he is at home.

I don't believe I could live in Iran again. A tree, once uprooted from the earth, is very difficult to plant again.

I get homesick.

Being sent away to boarding school at seven is as great an inspiration as any songwriter could have - to be taken away from one's family and locked away for 10 years. It does create an incredible intensity of emotion.

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

I not only lived physically away from my native land, but the values and critical judgments of those closest to me became stranger and stranger.

Exile is not a time frame. Exile is an experience. It's a sentiment.

Contemplating Christmas when you are isolated and far from home brings its own unique pain.

Austin is such a free and creative place, but I can't enjoy it as much because everyone I love is back in L.A.

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.

When memories fade, can one ever really return home?

When I first moved to London, I felt very homesick and yearned after the countryside a lot. Because London's hard. It's a big place, and it's lonely. It takes a while to get into it. But once I got into the flow of it and started to grow up, I realised that my home is wherever I am.

I never really felt like I belonged in California.

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.

I don't like being away from 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 miss my family all the time.