A Quote by James Baldwin

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

James Baldwin

Quote Topics

Back Go Home Leave Left Never Then Until

Quote Author

James Baldwin
American - Writer
August 2, 1924 - December 1, 1987

When you come from an immigrant home, you're in a whole different world until you leave your house. In my teenage years, I had to learn to switch cultures the second I left my house and, when I came back, to go back to my fundamentals.

Jessie Reyez

It's really going to happen. I really won't ever go back to school. Not ever. I'll never be famous or leave anything worthwhile behind. I'll never go to college or have a job. I won't see my brother grow up. I won't travel, never earn money, never drive, never fall in love or leave home or get my own house. It's really, really true. A thought stabs up, growing from my toes and ripping through me, until it stifles everything else and becomes the only thing I'm thinking. It fills me up like a silent scream.

Jenny Downham

I left home to go to college, and then I moved back home. I moved back for three years from 21 to 24.

Will Ferrell

It’s funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home.’ But then you come home, and of course it’s not the same. You can’t live with it, you can’t live away from it. And it seems like from then on there’s always this yearning for some place that doesn’t exist. I felt that. Still do. I’m never completely at home anywhere.

Danzy Senna

I'm very British at heart. When I come to England, I say I'm coming home, and then it's funny: when I leave England to go back to L.A., I also say I'm going back home.

Lily Collins

I came home [after funerals] and I thought if I go back to California, where I had a small house, I don't think I'll ever come east again. So I decided to stay and go through the halls and stairways, talk to Gilda Radner, holler, express some of my anger and make sure there were no ghosts in the hallways that I should ever be afraid of.And then I found out - it sounds strange, but I found out she had left me the house. We never talked about her dying and what she was going to leave me or I would ever leave her. We just didn't talk about those things.

Gene Wilder

When I announced on my Facebook page that I'm coming to Israel, people started telling me that I shouldn't go there, but I figured that if I'm not going to come here, then I guess I can't go back to the United States anymore and I can never go to Russia again and I should probably never go back to Germany and I should probably never go back to France and I should probably never go back to England....All I see here is a really beautiful city.

John Grant

I couldn't ever go back home without being something. I probably would never have gone back home. That was definitely a big motivation. To get back home, and not empty-handed.

The Weeknd

I was very good until I left home to go to a little college in West Virginia, and then I started to break some rules.

Frances McDormand

I'll go do films for three or four months and then I can't wait to go home to LA. And I complain about LA left and right, but then I always end up wanting to go home, you know?

Tobey Maguire

I am going to sit here in the river. If you go home to sleep, I will sleep in front of your house. And if you go away, I will follow you - until you tell me to go away. Then I'll leave. But I have to love you for the rest of my life.

Paulo Coelho

I like to go home early, that's my thing. My idea of a pub crawl lasts from midday until 5 P.M., then I can go home, play with my kid, have tea and go to bed.

Nick Frost

Life at home wasn't very good and I had really left by the time I was 16 and didn't go back until after Cambridge when I went to look after my mother when she was dying.

Roger Scruton

I'm going to come back to West Virginia when this is over. There's something ancient and deeply-rooted in my soul. I like to think that I have left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I'll never really be able to leave for good until I find it. And I don't want to look for it, because I might find it and have to leave." - from a letter to his mother Helen Pancake that Breece wrote in Charlottesville, where he was studying writing.

Breece D'J Pancake

She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there--like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.