Hometown Quotes

“London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Because I miss them. Because I need them. Because I love them.”
― Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

“He should have seen this coming, but he hadn't. Of course she wouldn't want to move back to Wynette after everything that had happened to her there. But what about his family, his friends, his roots, which stretched so deep into that rocky soil he'd become part of it?”
― Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Call Me Irresistible

“For the city, his city, stood unchanging on the edge of time: the same burning dry city of his nocturnal terrors and the solitary pleasures of puberty, where flowers rusted and salt corroded, where nothing had happened for four centuries except a slow aging among withered laurels and putrefying swamps. In winter sudden devastating downpours flooded the latrines and turned the streets into sickening bogs. In summer an invisible dust as harsh as red-hot chalk was blown into even the best-protected corners of the imagination by mad winds that took the roofs off the houses and carried away children through the air.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“She spared a glance for the townscape of jagged roofs and straggly tree branches, of rough edges that snagged the sky and made it bleed starlight.”
― Angela Panayotopulos

“There’s something comforting about living where you’ve always been. Everyone knows you. You’re part of something.”
― Jen DeLuca, Well Met

“My hometown... was always there, at all times, unchanging. What I think... is not that we go back to our hometowns, but that someday our hometowns come back into each of our hearts.”
― Jirō Taniguchi, A Journal Of My Father

“Không ai dời đặng non, không ai chia đặng nước, thế thì tháng một ở Bắc Việt, tất nhiên vẫn rét, mưa tháng một ở Bắc Việt tất nhiên vẫn riêu riêu. Và nghĩ đến như thế thì bảo không yêu Bắc Việt làm sao cho được?
Mưa rét thì khổ, khổ nhất cho người nghèo, nhưng biết như thế mà vẫn cứ yêu bởi vì cái mưa, cái rét ấy thông thường quá, vì chỉ có Bắc Việt mới có cái mưa cái rét ấy thôi. Ai đã xa nhà, trôi nổi ở một phương trời không có nước mắm, không có phở, tương tư phở và nước mắm thế nào thì ở giữa một thành phố khét lẹt hơi người, chói chan nắng lửa, người ta cũng nhớ mưa rét tháng một ở quê hương mình đến thế là cùng. (Tháng Một)”
― Vũ Bằng, Thương Nhớ Mười Hai

“It was soothing to sit with life-long friends, the cacophony of bar sounds around us while we caught up on our lives and talked about the glory days of high school. My life since then had been on an accelerated trajectory, not always aimed in the best direction. I acquired a sense of well-being from those friends who married their high school sweethearts, set up housekeeping a stone's throw from where they grew up, and kept the heartbeat of small-town living beating rhythmically.”
― Debi Tolbert Duggar, Riding Soul-O

“When you are part of a place, growing that moment in its soil, there’s never a need to say you’re from there. I never uttered the words ‘I’m from Idaho’ until I’d left it.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“One of the advantages to visiting historic sites as opposed to merely reading about them is the endearing glow of hometown pride.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“She told me that some day she would go to my hometown and stay there for a while and be happy. And she will see me in every wall, every street, every glass, in every person, in every wave of the sea and smile.”
― Avijeet Das

“She told me "I want to go to your hometown.
Someday I will go there and I will smile till the time I will stay there and be happy because its your home town. I am going to see you in every wall, every street, every glass, in every person, in every wave of the sea and smile.”
― Avijeet Das

“delete that old version of me in your head, it's expired.”
― Jordan Hoechlin

“Someone told me "I want to go to your hometown.
Someday I will go there and I will smile till the time I will stay there and be happy because its your home town. I am going to see you in every wall, every street, every glass, in every person, in every wave of the sea and smile.”
― Avijeet Das

“I can remember Grandma telling stories about little nest makers leaving wards in the wild. The details would shift and change as she got older, but it always involved Saint Vinson's crystal spider and a wandering soul haunted by nightmares.”
― John Michael Bauer, Besnowed

“At one point, Jack was enlisted to move Red from his aunt Maude’s house in Redlands to his grandma Iris’s house in Pomona.”
― Michelle Huneven, Round Rock

“Thế nhưng mà thôi, nói mấy cũng là thừa, bởi vì từ xưa tới nay ai cũng biết là Bắc Việt nghèo
khổ mà Nam Việt thì phè phỡn. Phè phỡn vì Nam Việt là con cưng được trời thương, nhưng
“con ghét làm nên” có lẽ cũng là được trời thương cách khác. Nhưng dù là con thương hay con ghét thì cũng là anh em ruột thịt cho nên Nam, Bắc lúc nào cũng thương nhau, mỗi khi thấy cẳng đậu đun hạt đậu, thì hạt đậu khóc hu hu:
Cùng chung nhau một mẹ,
Đun nhau nỡ thế ru?
(Tháng Một)”
― Vũ Bằng, Thương Nhớ Mười Hai

“It’s all about having the heart … to leave the city and its false glitter for home if you’ve tried long enough and still can’t make it. I would be a big liar to tell you it’s easy to survive after having left home for years. You’re almost like a child when you return – you are starting from the scratch. But you have to behave like a child too if you’re ready to survive; be ever eager to learn. Get ready to take insults from every village rats set to eat your yams of respect and pride. Toe the line till you settle down properly and begin to understand the ways of the people back home. People would laugh at you at first but when your conditions start improving, everyone would laugh with you. Don’t forget the saying of our people: the same mouth that speaks of evil is the same mouth that speaks of good. It’s the heart to go back not minding the years that have been wasted. That is the secret.”
― Godwin Inyang, Gamblers Make Better Lovers

“He is a man of many lands and many names, but no native soil. Perhaps he carries his hometown on his back, like an ageless turtle.”
― Elif Shafak, Honor

“وها أنت تتخلّصُ ممّا كان يمتنعُ عليك التخلّصُ منه، تلك المدينة، مدينتي، التي توهّمتُ أنّها ستكون حاضرةً للأبد، شديدةَ الرسُوخِ، وعَصِيّةً على الالتهام، فأغذّي أنا أيضًا شراهتي في تدميرِها وهلاكِها. هي تفرُّ وأنا لا أعُودُ”
― عالية ممدوح, التشهي

“On that momentous day of my first return to my grandfather’s place in Ojoto after many years of my sojourn in America, I was lost in my thought until a light wind blew across the pedestrian path in a wooded area where I stood, caressing the trees’ leaves and small branches. The stubborn leaves swerved in all directions like untrained dancers learning to strut after consuming palm-wine from large calabash jugs. Looking up, I watched weakened leaves snapped off and gained their freedom from primordial trees. A liberation dance followed in the dense air above me before the leaves set down. Listening to beautiful sounds made by birds converging around me, as if they were singing for the newly liberated leaves, I found myself lost in the wonderment of nature. What I experienced had drawn me back to that exhilarating place for mental respite each time I returned home.”
― Fidelis O. Mkparu, 2021

“… it’s this place, this town where time doesn’t move forward like it’s supposed to. Where stories get stuck in your head like a tooth burrowed deep in your flesh. I feel like Harrow Lake is working its way inside me.”
― Kat Ellis, Harrow Lake

“Pariva was a small village, unimportant enough that it rarely appeared on any maps of Esperia. Bordered by mountains and sea, it seemed untouched by time. The school looked the same as she remembered; so did the market and Mangia Road---a block of eating establishments that included the locally famous Belmagio bakery---and cypress and laurel and pine trees still surrounded the local square, where the villagers came out to gossip or play chess or even sing together.
Had it really been forty years since she had returned? It seemed like only yesterday that she'd strolled down Pariva's narrow streets, carrying a sack of pine nuts to her parents' bakery or stopping by the docks to watch the fishing boats sail across the glittering sea.
Back then, she'd been a daughter, a sister, a friend. A mere slip of a young woman. Home had been a humble two-storied house on Constanza Street, with a door as yellow as daffodils and cobblestoned stairs that led into a small courtyard in the back. Her father had kept a garden of herbs; he was always frustrated by how the mint grew wild when what he truly wanted to grow was basil.
The herbs went into the bread that her parents sold at their bakery. Papa crafted the savory loaves and Mamma the sweet ones, along with almond cakes drizzled with lemon glaze, chocolate biscuits with hazelnut pralines, and her famous cinnamon cookies. The magic the Blue Fairy had grown up with was sugar shimmering on her fingertips and flour dusting her hair like snow. It was her older brother, Niccolo, coaxing their finicky oven into working again, and Mamma listening for the crackle of a golden-brown crust just before her bread sang. It was her little sister Ilaria's tongue turning green after she ate too many pistachio cakes. Most of all, magic was the smile on Mamma's, Papa's, Niccolo's, and Ilaria's faces when they brought home the bakery's leftover chocolate cake and sank their forks into a sumptuous, moist slice.
After dinner, the Blue Fairy and her siblings made music together in the Blue Room. Its walls were bluer than the midsummer sky, and the windows arched like rainbows. It'd been her favorite room in the house.”
― Elizabeth Lim, When You Wish Upon a Star

“How had I never noticed before how dear she was? How dear, in fact, was everyone in my village, and every house and tree and garden. How comforting the whisper of the wheel of the mill, the clanging of the smith’s hammer, the lowing of the cattle, the laughter of the women.”
― Martine Leavitt, Keturah and Lord Death

“Listening to some songs makes us nostalgic. All the past memories flood our mind, and we begin to miss our hometown achingly.”
― Avijeet Das

“Turn to the left looking down Mermod,
can you hear the horn in the air, the rolling on the tracks as those boxcars rush bye thru town, look the buds are opening the leaves are spreading and the lawn might need a cut soon, all at the courthouse square, turn and peer back over the other shoulder. You can and still faintly see the hill off in the distance, once a furniture store to the left and a bakery to the right, maybe a trim at Dean Barbershop, or go by, stop and say howdy to Karen and Tony Veralrud at the pharmacy or pick up things at Browns Grocery, that car roof glistens and climbs over the rise to disappear, another day in our little hometown.”
― levipaultaylor

“Two things people don't like to overshare about are their kids and their hometowns. The first might result in a fractured relationship or lack of trust. The second might put you out of work and shunned by people you used to call friends. The only thing folks value above their kids is their bank account, no matter how many might insist otherwise. Money talks. The threat of losing money keeps loose lips closed, for the most part.”
― Amy Matayo, They Call Her Dirty Sally

“Your hometown makes you and breaks you and makes you again.”
― Essie J. Chambers, Swift River

“And, my God, was it really not she he met later, far from the shores of their homeland, under an alien sky, in the torrid South, in the marvellous Eternal City, in the brilliance of a ball, to the thunder of music, in a palazzo (it absolutely must be a palazzo), drowned in a sea of lights, on this balcony, wreathed with myrtle and roses, where she, upon recognising him, so hastily took off her mask and whispered: "I am free", and trembling, threw herself into his arms, and with a cry of rapture, they embraced, and in an instant they forgot sorrow, separation, all their torments, the gloomy house, the old man, the dismal garden in their distant homeland, the bench on which, with one last passionate kiss, she had torn herself away from his arms, numb from torments of despair?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights