Quotes on homesickness and home
The post “Where is Home?” prompted a comment from the Expat Archive Centre which mentioned the word hiraeth.
They kindly linked to this page which explains more about the concept of hiraeth; homesickness, specifically for Wales. Unfortunately I can’t play the video as I’m outside of the UK, but there’s a transcript you can read if you are also unable to view it.
If you’re experiencing a bout of hiraeth or homesickness, perhaps these will help.
You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it’s all right.
~ Maya Angelou
Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.
~ Jodi Picoult
Our native soil draws all of us, by I know not what sweetness, and never allows us to forget.
~ Ovid
Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.
~ Charles Dickens
Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to.
~ John Ed Pearce
Expatability Chat Podcast
If you’d prefer to listen to me talk about this topic, here is my podcast episode about How to cope with feeling homesick as an expat
The authors of the quotes have a clear definition of home – they are thinking of a place. Some of the things people have written as comments on my blog are here:
“Home is wherever I don’t have to explain where I’m from….”
“Home is where your suitcases are opened and stowed…for however long!”
“On an international flight… where nobody can understand each other’s funny accents, but where everybody understands it doesn’t matter for the next 17 hours, where nobody is from the same place, but everybody knows it doesn’t define you, where I can finally, in the last place I expected, feel at home…”
“It seems as I go through life and as I move around, I just add more and more layers of meaning to the word “homeâ€!”
All of those are from http://communicatingacrossboundariesblog.com/2013/01/08/home-in-quotes/
Another one with interesting responses is http://communicatingacrossboundariesblog.com/2012/02/07/saudade-a-word-for-the-third-culture-kid/
Saudade is like the word you hiraeth I think…
Thank you.
Yes, saudade seems to have a similar interpretation to hiraeth.
As a third culture kid and adult expat for years raising tck’s I find these quotes inadequate and unhelpful. Perhaps it’s because they are not quotes on home from TCK’s.
Perhaps it’s because I’m a TCK myself and have lived as an expat raising TCK’s but none of these quotes were helpful to me leading me to yet another realization that the TCK’s concept of home is more like that of the immigrant or refugee.
Thank you for your comments, Marilyn.
Perhaps you could share some quotes that you have found personally helpful in your own particular situation? I’m sure others would like to see them.