Quotes about home

Everybody has their own idiopathic reaction to their childhood home.

The world in which I work and live is a long way from home, but the early bearings I took as a child on the prairie, surrounded by working people and the communities they established, often in difficult circumstances, have been a steadying and reassuring presence. They are familiar markers and sentinels, useful and reliable even now, forty years after I left the land and the people that launched me.

In 1962, I put my home state of South Dakota in a rearview mirror and drove away. I was uncertain of my final destinatin but determined to get well beyond the slow rhythms of life in the small towns and rural culture of the Great Plains. I thought that the influences of the people, the land, and the time during my first twenty-two years of life were part of the past. But gradually I came to know how much they meant to my future, and so I have returned often as part of a long pilgrimage of renewal.

When I do return, my wardrobe and home address are New York, my job is high-profile, and my bank account is secure, but when I enter a South Dakota cafe or stop for gas, I am just someone who grew up around here, left a while back, and never really answers when he's asked, "When you gonna move back home?" I am caught in that place all too familiar to small-state natives who have moved on to a rewarding life in larger arenas: I don't want to move back, but in a way I never want to leave. I am nourished by every visit.

Scared animals return home, regardless of whether home is safe or frightening.

She could be—he hoped would be—what he had always lacked: a center to the map of his life, that one, necessary fixed point from which he could navigate out into the world and by which he could always find his way back home again.

“I am not one to deny the broadening effects of distant lands,” offered Nofreg, “yet I have often said that the chief benefit of travel is to allow the returned sojourner a renewed appreciation of his native milieu.”

We all have our own island, the one we carry with us wherever we go.

A place becomes a home when it sustains you, when it feeds you in body as well as spirit.

Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children’s future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do.

When we call a place by name it is transformed from wilderness to homeland.

Where is your country? he said.

I don't know, said John Grady. I don't know where it is. I don't know what happens to country.

I still think that being forced to leave your home out of fear is one of the worst injustices a human being can face.