quotations about home
All exiles carry a map within them that points the way homeward.
JACQUELINE CAREY
Kushiel's Dart
The sweetest type of heaven is home -- nay, heaven itself is the home for whose acquisition we are to strive the most strongly. Home, in one form and another, is the great object of life. It stands at the end of every day's labor, and beckons us to its bosom; and life would be cheerless and meaningless, did we not discern across the river that divides it from the life beyond, glimpses of the pleasant mansions prepared for us.
JOSIAH GILBERT HOLLAND
Gold-Foil
Home is like a garden, and the elder is the master landscaper, knowledgeable of the seasons, times for planting and pruning, and ritual significance and medicinal properties of flowers, herbs, fruits and leaves.
GRAHAM D. ROWLES & HABIB CHAUDHURY
Home and Identity Late in Life
Wherever I fly from my own dear nest,
I always come back, for home is the best.
MAUD LINDSAY
"Fleet Wing and Sweet Voice", Mother Stories
Home is like what you take away each time you leave the house. Like a wristwatch, it ticks beside the ticking that is your heart. Whether or not you hear it, look at its face, or feel its hold. We're with you is what the minute, hour, and second hands of home have to tell.
MICHAEL J. ROSEN
Home
It is always sad when someone leaves home, unless they are simply going around the corner and will return in a few minutes with ice-cream sandwiches.
DANIEL HANDLER (as Lemony Snicket)
Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
Why am I going home? he asked himself. But he knew why. It was time. In order not to lose all that he had gained, he had to move forward and risk it all.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Her monument was her home. It grew up quietly, as quietly as a flower grows; and no one knew, she did not know herself, how much she had done to tend and water and train it. Her husband had absolute trust in her. He earned the money, she expended it. And as she put as much thought into her expenditure as he put into his earning, each dollar was doubled in the expending. She had inherited that mysterious faculty which we call taste; and she cultivated it with fidelity. Every home she visited she studied, though always unconsciously, as though it were a museum or an art gallery; and from every visit she brought away some thought which came out of the alembic of her loving imagination, fitted to its appropriate place in her own home. She was too genuine to be an imitator; for imitation is always of kin to falsehood, and she abhorred falsehood. She was patient with everything but a lie. So she never copied in her own home or on her own person what she had seen elsewhere; yet everything she saw elsewhere entered into and helped complete the perfect picture of life which she was always painting with deft fingers in everything, from the honeysuckle which she trained over the door to the bureau in the guest's room, which her designing made a new work of art for every new friend, if it were only by a new nosegay and a change of vases. Putting her own personality into her home, thus making every room and almost every article of furniture speak of her, she had the gift to draw out from every guest his personality and make him at home and so make him his truest and best self.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
The law is very stern in its determination to protect the home. It lays great stress on the influence of home life in the shaping of character and it recognizes the mother as the chief figure there. If the mother is not what is called "a good woman," it will, in many instances, refuse to let her make a home for the children. Ruthlessly it will separate the children from the mother. And yet we all know that women who lead immoral lives can be good mothers. Some of the qualities that betray them into immorality may, in themselves, be good. Generous sympathies often lead to disaster. Besides, knowledge and experience of evil often becomes safeguards. Furthermore, women who are highly moral may nevertheless be very poor homemakers. The maintaining of a happy home requires qualities much more positive and active than resistance to this kind of temptation. There are multitudes of perfectly proper women who are baleful influences in the home life, who create all about them an atmosphere of discord. "If my mother weren't quite so good," I once heard a friend whimsically remark, "she would be a good deal better." At the time I suspected that he was referring to a habit of his mother's, well known among the neighbors, of indulging in censorious and malicious gossip, an expression of that high morality so valiantly maintained in many homes and so damaging to a real appreciation of goodness.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"The Home", Reactions and Other Essays Discussing Those States of Feeling and Attitude of Mind That Find Expression In Our Individual Qualities
Home is the first and most important school of character. It is there that every human being receives his best moral training, or his worst; for it is there that he imbibes those principles of conduct which endure through manhood, and cease only with life.
SAMUEL SMILES
Character
The home is like a reservoir pouring water into every avenue in moral life, in social life, in political life, in all life. If there are not enough moral principles to make the family adhere, there will not be enough political principles to make the state adhere. The same storm that upsets the ship in which the family sails will sink the frigate of the Constitution. The door of the home is the best fortress. Household utensils are the best artillery against evil invasions.
ROBERT G. LEE
"The Influence of a Christian Home"
Home is the place where you are most thoroughly yourself, with no pretenses.
VICTORIA MORAN
Creating a Charmed Life
If men lived like men indeed, their houses would be temples--temples which we should hardly dare to injure, and in which it would make us holy to be permitted to live; and there must be a strange dissolution of natural affection, a strange unthankfulness for all that homes have given and parents taught, a strange consciousness that we have been unfaithful to our fathers' honour, or that our own lives are not such as would make our dwellings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build to himself, and build for the little revolution of his own life only.
JOHN RUSKIN
The Seven Lamps of Architecture
Home is one of the sweetest words in the English language. At home we find food, clothing, and shelter. There infancy is cradled, childhood nurtured, youth guarded, manhood inspired, age supported. There sickness is healed, and sorrow soothed. There weariness rests, and oppression finds an asylum. Home is a magnet which ever attracts the heart, whether we sail on distant seas or wander in foreign climes. In the darkest day, the loneliest hour, the memory of home is like the dew upon Hermon, that falls in the night-season. Home is an oasis abounding in sparkling fountains, carolling birds, umbrageous trees, and spicy odors. What is home, when worthy of the name, but a relic of Paradise--a type of heaven!
A. G. STACY
The Home Circle, Jun. 1856
One returns to the place one came from.
JEAN DE LA FONTAINE
attributed, The Harper Book of Quotations
Love true and pure in the domestic circle, whether in the prince's palace or the humblest cottage, is God's greatest blessing--a foretaste of heaven on earth. A happy home, however humble, is to be preferred to an emperor's throne; it is possible to be very poor in worldly riches, and yet be very happy. There is more real happiness on this earth in small cottages than in any other residences, however grand, however stately or magnificent. Happiness is the one thing most of us are striving after; then let us remember it is to be found within ourselves, and not in our surroundings. The beating of loving hearts in cottage homes are oftener heard before the throne of grace than are those in palatial residences, and the sound of them echoes farther through heaven than any earthly paeans chanted from the lips of surpliced choristers, or other songs of praise where the heart's adoration is not with them; for dearer to God is the love and prayers of the poor than any offering that wealth can produce or gold purchase.
T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH
"On a Happy Home", Short Essays
From a misgoverned and disordered home many go forth to make other homes unhappy and miserable.
WALTER MATTHEWS
Human Life from Many Angles
An empty house is like a stray dog or a body from which life has departed.
SAMUEL BUTLER
The Way of All Flesh
Home is all the things you know by name: a family of dishes, books, and clothes that waits for you to choose among them every day. We're ready for you is what the chorus in your house sings. Your fingerprints are grinning on their faces.
MICHAEL J. ROSEN
Home
Construed as turf, home just seems a provisional claim, a designation you make upon a place, not one it makes on you. A certain set of buildings, a glimpsed, smudged window-view across a schoolyard, a musty aroma sniffed behind a garage when you were a child, all of which come crowding in upon your latter-day senses--those are pungent things and vivid, even consoling. But to me they are also inert and nostalgic and unlikely to connect you to the real, to that essence art can sometimes achieve, which is permanence.
RICHARD FORD
Harper's, Feb. 1992