Everybody has a home team: It’s the people you call when you get a flat tire or when something terrible happens. It’s the people who, near or far, know everything that’s wrong with you and love you anyways. These are the ones who tell you their secrets, who get themselves a glass of water without asking when they’re at your house. These are the people who cry when you cry. These are your people, your middle-of-the-night, no-matter-what people.
What is home? My favorite definition is "a safe place," a place where one is free from attack, a place where one experiences secure relationships and affirmation. It's a place where people share and understand each other. Its relationships are nurturing. The people in it do not need to be perfect; instead, they need to be honest, loving, supportive, recognizing a common humanity that makes all of us vulnerable.
Home wasn't a set house, or a single town on a map. It was wherever the people who loved you were, whenever you were together. Not a place, but a moment, and then another, building on each other like bricks to create a solid shelter that you take with you for your entire life, wherever you may go.
The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.
For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow. Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail. A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live. When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all. A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.
I wanted to cry because I needed you there with me so bad. I knew in that moment that I was in love with you. I was in love with the way you loved me. When you wrapped your arms around me and held me, I knew that no matter what happened with my life, you were my home. You stole the biggest piece of my heart that night.
After all," Anne had said to Marilla once, "I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string.
Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. I'm not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don't have to be like anyone else. I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.
You need to belong to yourself, and let others belong to themselves too. You need to be free and detached from things and your surroundings. You need to build your home in your own simple existence, not in friends, lovers, your career or material belongings, because these are things you will lose one day.
Doors are funny things. Some lead to somewhere exciting and wonderful, while others lead to the mundane and ordinary. Some, because they are gaudy and ornate, usher us into the land of greed and money. But many look unassuming and plain, yet hidden behind their simplicity one can find love; warmth; a cozy fire; a home cooked meal and a beautiful family.It's these doors I search for in life and it's these doors that I shall find.
A man of God would never burn or harm a temple of any kind - regardless of religion. A true man of God would see every temple or divine mansion built to glorify the Creator - as an extension of the temple closest to his home, regardless of its shape, size, or color. A man who truly recognizes and knows God can see God in all things.
Privacy is a protection from the unreasonable use of state and corporate power. But that is, in a sense, a secondary thing. In the first instance, privacy is the statement in words of a simple understanding, which belongs to the instinctive world rather than the formal one, that some things are the province of those who experience them and not naturally open to the scrutiny of others: courtship and love, with their emotional nakedness; the simple moments of family life; the appalling rawness of grief. That the state and other systems are precluded from snooping on these things is important - it is a strong barrier between the formal world and the hearth, extended or not - but at root privacy is a simple understanding: not everything belongs to everyone.
I believe that a godly home is a foretaste of heaven. Our homes, imperfect as they are, must be a haven from the chaos outside. They should be a reflection of our eternal home, where troubled souls find peace, weary hearts find rest, hungry bodies find refreshment, lonely pilgrims find communion, and wounded spirits find compassion.
Happiness doesn't lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home. And home is not a house-home is a mythological conceit. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace.
Do we take less pride in the possession of our home because its walls were built by some unknown carpenter, its tapestries woven by some unknown weaver on a far Oriental shore, in some antique time? No. We show our home to our friends with the pride as if it were our home, which it is. Why then should we take less pride when reading a book written by some long-dead author? Is it not our book just as much, or even more so, than theirs? So the landowner says, ‘Look at my beautiful home! Isn’t it fine?’ And not, ‘Look at the home so-and-so has built.’ Thus we shouldn’t cry, ‘Look what so-and-so has written. What a genius so-and-so is!’ But rather, ‘Look at what I have read! Am I not a genius? Have I not invented these pages? The walls of this universe, did I not build? The souls of these characters, did I not weave?
Small Moth...She's slicing ripe white peachesinto the Tony the Tiger bowland dropping slivers for the dogpoised vibrating by her foot to stop their fallwhen she spots it, camouflaged,a glimmer and then full on-happiness, plashing blunt soft wingsinside her as if it wantsto escape again.
Romance is about putting things aright after some tragedy has put them asunder. It is about restoration of the right relations among things — and going home is where that restoration occurs because that is where it matters most.
In all my wanderings through this world of care,In all my griefs -- and God has given my share --I still had hopes, my latest hours to crown,Amidst these humble bowers to lay me down;To husband out life's taper at the close,And keep the flame from wasting, by repose:I still had hopes, for pride attends us still,Amidst the swains to show my book-learn'd skill,Around my fire an evening group to draw,And tell of all I felt, and all I saw;And, as a hare, whom hounds and horns pursue,Pants to the place from whence at first she flew,I still had hopes, my long vexations past,Here to return -- and die at home at last.
They want us to be afraid. They want us to be afraid of leaving our homes. They want us to barricade our doors and hide our children. Their aim is to make us fear life itself! They want us to hate. They want us to hate 'the other'. They want us to practice aggression and perfect antagonism. Their aim is to divide us all! They want us to be inhuman. They want us to throw out our kindness. They want us to bury our love and burn our hope. Their aim is to take all our light! They think their bricked walls will separate us. They think their damned bombs will defeat us. They are so ignorant they don’t understand that my soul and your soul are old friends. They are so ignorant they don’t understand that when they cut you I bleed. They are so ignorant they don’t understand that we will never be afraid, we will never hate and we will never be silent for life is ours!
Offering care means being a companion, not a superior. It doesn’t matter whether the person we are caring for is experiencing cancer, the flu, dementia, or grief.If you are a doctor or surgeon, your expertise and knowledge comes from a superior position. But when our role is to be providers of care, we should be there as equals.
Even though people experiencing dementia become unable to recount what has just happened, they still go through the experience—even without recall. The psychological present lasts about three seconds. We experience the present even when we have dementia. The emotional pain caused by callous treatment or unkind talk occurs during that period. The moods and actions of people with dementia are expressions of what they have experienced, whether they can still use language and recall, or not.
The pages continue to turn, and every day I'm a little older, hopefully a little wiser and a lot more grateful. Do I have regrets? I have a few - but not as many as you might think. If it hadn't been for the darkness, I never would have known the light. In life we all take different paths, some more difficult than others, but in the end, all that matters is whether or not they lead us home.
The only place I ever felt at home was with you. There isn’t a place for me anywhere anymore… I’ve been evicted.
Getting through life without a lot of money, possessions, and/or friends is admirable, especially if it is by choice.
Some of us can live without a society but not without a family.
In united families, they might sleep with half filled stomach but no one sleeps with empty stomach.
You can take the Indian out of the family, but you cannot take the family out of the Indian.
In your name, the family name is at last because it's the family name that lasts.
Don't compare the size of your roof with the size of the sky.
God is going to send you someone that will rescue you. Then one day you will rescue them in return and together your story will rescue others. He has always been a God of rescues and a maker of warriors for his grace. You only need to believe that you are part of something greater than you know.
We need to go first because we cannot live without your love and care. If we lived longer than you, we would not and could not survive. It’s supposed to be this way. We also need to cross the Rainbow Bridge before you do so that we can be on the other side to greet you when you get there. We wait at home for you here and we wait at Home for you there. It’s just the way it is.
Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.
My friend Bailey is looking at me with tears in her eyes and a smile of pure joy. She sees me, the real me, not the broken little bird that my mother sees, or the Ambassador of Hope that my father sees, or the girl who was stupid enough to walk off with a stranger and ruin everyone's lives that my sister sees. Bailey sees me as I want to be: a normal, non-newsworthy, non-broken, non-victimized sixteen-year-old girl.
I don't care what is written," Meyer Landsman says. "I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag.
Do you think there is heaven or hell? he signed.‘I don’t know. Not in the Christian way, if that’s what you mean. I think people have a right to believe in whatever they want. I just don’t.’…If someone came in here and gave you positive proof, would you do anything different?She shook her head. ‘I think it’s just as likely that someone could say that this place, right here, is heaven, hell and earth all at the same time. And we still wouldn’t know what to do differently. Everyone just muddles through, trying not to make too many mistakes.
Dad?" Jesus said."Yes son. What is it?" God replied."Why have you left the stars turned on. It's night time," Jesus asked."It's so that people can find their way home," God said."What do you mean?" Jesus asked his dad."Well" God started to say, "sometimes a person loses their way in life and when that happens all they have to do is look up at the stars and then they will find their way back home to me.""But, what about if it's daytime and there are no stars?" Jesus now asked."Then, I will send them a rainbow to show them the way," God told his son.
You are more likely to find three TVs inside a randomly selected house than you are to find a single book that is or was not read to pass an exam, to please God, or to be a better cook.
If I were to go back in time with the knowledge that I have today about Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS), I would invest the money into changing the electrical characteristics of my body and exhaust that route first, particularly if no one else in the home is showing the condition. If everyone is sick in the home, it is probably an environmental issue that warrants expense on changing the environmental factors.
On building homes for fallen angels:When I was small - I sought a home,a place to go and rest my bones.Then founded something, of my own,I lived among the restless stones.If seeking leads you back to evil,what good is that, I asked a weevil.He said a home is what you make,it can't be real, if it is fake...And if you wait instead of seek,will you find love, or something bleak?I know (myself) for I have found,a beauty, hidden – in a sound.Waiting is boring.And so is exploring.A smile is sometimes all it takes.And then your whole world simply breaks.
I was free with every road as my home. No limitations and no commitments. But then summer passed and winter came and I fell short for safety. I fell for its spell, slowly humming me to sleep, because I was tired and small, too weak to take or handle those opinions and views, attacking me from every angle. Against my art, against my self, against my very way of living. I collected my thoughts, my few possessions and built isolated walls around my values and character. I protected my own definition of beauty and success like a treasure at the bottom of the sea, for no one saw what I saw, or felt the same as I did, and so I wanted to keep to myself. You hide to protect yourself.
The four of them stand in the cockpit of the Misdemeanor as they motor from one town to another. They pass their house, which is not theirs any longer. Libby cuts the throttle, and they stall there in front of their sprawling memory. The four of them have come up for the closing; since all of them are owners, they all must be present to sign away this place. They have given most of the land to the Maine Preservation Society, and the house, they have sold to a family who promises not to tear the whole thing down, though they know that is a lie. The oak is yellow and peeks from behind the house. The glossy white windows of the great room look down upon them. It is cold and they all wear their foul-weather gear, bright-yellow slickers, except Gwen, in a red poncho to accommodate the swell of her belly. Libby keeps one hand on the tiller and the other she slips into Tom’s hand. He gives it a squeeze and then puts his arm around her. Danny moves from the stern to stand between Tom and Gwen. They all stand on the starboard side looking at the house. Libby and Tom, then Danny, his hand resting on his brother’s shoulder, and Gwen next to him, her arms crossed over her protruding belly, her hair long and dark hanging down her back. She is no longer a beacon, but a buoy in her poncho, red right returning. The sky is gray and low and promises a choppy ferry ride to the mainland, but there in the safe haven of the harbor it is calm and windless, and the house isn’t empty, but expectant. The flat water, dark green now, lies empty, the float pulled out the month before. Going from town dock to town dock, there is no need for a tender. There is no way for them to come ashore, even if they wanted to. A house like this is not supposed to exist now. It comes from another era. It is a ghost, like the schooners that sail through the thoroughfare every summer. It is an aberration, a figment. It is their great shingled memory.
Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they area dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.
He had a little single-story house, three bedrooms, a full bathroom and a half bathroom, a combined kitchen-living room-dining room with windows that faced west, a small brick porch where there was a wooden bench worn by the wind that came down from the mountains and the sea, the wind from the north, the wind through the gaps, the wind that smelled like smoke and came from the south. He had books he'd kept for more than twenty-five years. Not many. All of them old. He had books he'd bought in the last ten years, books he didn't mind lending, books that could've been lost or stolen for all he cared. He had books that he sometimes received neatly packaged and with unfamiliar return addresses, books he didn't even open anymore. He had a yard perfect for growing grass and planting flowers, but he didn't know what flowers would do best there--flowers, as opposed to cacti or succulents. There would be time (so he thought) for gardening. He had a wooden gate that needed a coat of paint. He had a monthly salary.
Most people do not mind having a house that is smaller and/or a car that is cheaper than their neighbours’, as long as they each earn and have more money than their neighbours, and, equally important, their neighbours know that.
Diana frowns. “You’re taking me home, right? You just said you would.” “Hoink hoink! Of course, piglet. But I meant your real home.” “Which, last I checked,” says Diana acidly, “is in Los Angeles, California, United States of America, solar system, planet Earth.” “Hmm,” says the boar, hiccupping dreamily. “That’s what you think, darling. Tell me, can you say you’ve felt really at home at that address? Haven’t you been homesick your whole life?
And when the earth began to rumble and quake, as fear and frantic set in, he ran back inside the house past his wife and children, gathering all the valuables and things he thought of importance, and ran back to his car packing away. After making two trips in and out, he waited in the car for his family to come out, in fear they darted through the darkness and pelting cold rain. When everything calmed down, and the house was intact and safe, he returned putting everything back in its place, had the kids go to bed, told his wife he loves her and turned off the light.
If we really believe what we say we believe- if we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a "wandering to find home", why should we not look forward to the arrival. There are, aren't there, only three things we can do about death: to desire it, to fear it, or to ignore it. The third alternative, which is the one the modern world calls "healthy" is surely the most uneasy and precarious of all.
No one will come and save you. No one will come riding on a white horse and take all your worries away. You have to save yourself, little by little, day by day. Build yourself a home. Take care of your body. Find something to work on. Something that makes you excited, something you want to learn. Get yourself some books and learn them by heart. Get to know the author, where he grew up, what books he read himself. Take yourself out for dinner. Dress up for no one but you and simply feel nice. it’s a lovely feeling, to feel pretty. You don’t need anyone to confirm it.
They can award me with the greatest accolades and reward me with the finest diamonds. They can name days and streets after me, canonise and celebrate me. They can make me the queen of their kingdom, the president of their nation. They can carry my picture in their wallets and whisper my name in their prayers but, tell me, what is all this worth if your voice isn’t the one calling me home?
I’m learning persistence and the closing of doors, the way the seasons come and go as I keep walking on these roads, back and forth, to find myself in new time zones, new arms with new phrases and new goals. And it hurts to become, hurts to find out about the poverty and gaps, the widow and the leavers. It hurts to accept that it hurts and it hurts to learn how easy it is for people to not need other people. Or how easy it is to need other people but that you can never build a home in someone’s arms because they will let go one day and you must build your own.
It’s the beating of my heart. The way I lie awake, playing with shadows slowly climbing up my wall. The gentle moonlight slipping through my window and the sound of a lonely car somewhere far away, where I long to be too, I think. It’s the way I thought my restless wandering was over, that I’d found whatever I thought I had found, or wanted, or needed, and I started to collect my belongings. Build a home. Safe behind the comfort of these four walls and a closed door. Because as much as I tried or pretended or imagined myself as a part of all the people out there,I was still the one locking the door every night.Turning off the phone and blowing out the candles so no one knew I was home. ’cause I was never really well around the expectations of my personalityand I wanted to keep to myself. and because I haven’t been very impressed lately. By people, or places.Or the way someone said he loved me and then slowly changed his mind.
Legion, cuneum formate!’ Reyna yelled. ‘Advance!’ Another cheer on Jason’s right as Percy and Annabeth reunited with the forces of Camp Half-Blood. ‘Greeks!’ Percy yelled. ‘Let’s, um, fight stuff!’ They yelled like banshees and charged. Jason grinned. He loved the Greeks. They had no organization whatsoever, but they made up for it with enthusiasm.
The Men of the Ordeal do not march to save the World, Proyas--at least not first and foremost. They march to save their wives and children. Their tribes and their nations. If they learn that the world, their world, slips into ruin behind them, that their wives and daughters may perish for want of their shields, their swords, the Host of Hosts would melt about the edges, then collapse.
A woman in combat? Yes. Since when? Since Native American warrior Buffalo Calf Road Woman knocked that prick General George Custer off of his horse. Since Pantea Arteshbod propelled herself to become one of the greatest Persian commanders during the reign of Cyrus the Great. Since Hua Mulan disguised herself as a male to engage in combat and became one of China’s most respected heroines.
Let my silence grow with noise as pregnant mothers grow with life. Let my silence permeate these walls as sunlight permeates a home. Let the silence rise from unwatered graves and craters left by bombs. Let the silence rise from empty bellies and surge from broken hearts. The silence of the hidden and forgotten. The silence of the abused and tortured. The silence of the persecuted and imprisoned. The silence of the hanged and massacred. Loud as all the sounds can be, let my silence be loud so the hungry may eat my words and the poor may wear my words. Loud as all the sounds can be, let my silence be loud so I may resurrect the dead and give voice to the oppressed. My silence speaks.
Bubba then grabbed a hold of my leg and his eyes got all cloudy and that terrible pink sky seem to drain all the colour in his face. He was trying to say something, and so I bent over real close to hear what it was. But I never could make it out. So I asked the medic, ' You hear what he say?' And the medic say, 'Home. He said, home.' Bubba, he died, and that's all I got to say about that.
I could have become a doctor, an engineer, a mechanic or even a car salesman but instead, I chose to be a soldier. Who was to blame? The way they glorified war back home could make anyone quit their job and join the army. The romanticized notions of being a soldier lasted till the time you had to take a life or two. After that, it all came crashing down and most of the men who signed up pulled their hair wondering why they bought into all this bullshit. We had no one to blame but ourselves. We wanted to serve this country and what better way to do it than to shoot, bomb and incinerate the enemy as our comrades fall next to us and a wife and mother somewhere hold on to a flag tightly and shed tears of loss. There was no glory in war, there was only death. These designations and medals were like magnets on a refrigerator. They didn’t mean a thing to the children who were orphaned or wives who were widowed. They didn’t mean a thing to soldiers who walked home after years on a battlefield to find their wives in bed with someone else. Yet we kept going forward, obeying every order pushed down our throats… fighting, killing.
It will never end.Till the world ends in the chaos of Ragnarok, we will fight for our women, for our land, and for our homes. Some Christians speak of peace, of the evil of war, and who does not want peace? But then some crazed warrior comes screaming his god's filthy name into your face and his only ambitions are to kill you, to rape your wife, to enslave your daughters, and take your home, and so you must fight.
Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house. This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms.
How I miss wandering around with old souls, Aimlessly moving from one place to anotherHow I miss all our dreams and our goalsAnd how we've lost ourselves to find each otherSeems like a playful game of hide-n-seekBut that's how we'll forever play this lifeLoving and living the truth that we seekUntil embraced we find our way to striveGazing into strangers' eyes to find our soul mates,Knowing we're so much closer than we thought.Our heart keeps the light that forever radiatesThrough all the darkness, 'til love is taughtAnd yet again we look into the skies,We see the stars, the moon, that lightMissing our home beyond the nightsLiving in love until the end of the fight.
You're back where you swore yourself you wouldn't beThe familiar shackles you can't tell from your own skinYour head's under water when you learned to swimOn a road to hell, congratulations, you're free...
I never said it was easy to find your place in this world, but I’m coming to the conclusion that if you seek to please others, you will forever be changing because you will never be yourself, only fragments of someone you could be. You need to belong to yourself, and let others belong to themselves too. You need to be free and detached from things and your surroundings. You need to build your home in your own simple existence, not in friends, lovers, your career or material belongings, because these are things you will lose one day. That’s the natural order of this world. This is called the practice of detachment.
She tried to remember all the times she had spoken to him. She replayed every moment she could remember at the beach last week. Not once had she led him to believe that she liked him improperly. And yet, last night, he had appeared as if she had invited him. She had given herself so willingly, so lasciviously, that he must have thought she had desired him all along. Perhaps she had, or perhaps she had not realised how pleasurable intimacy could be.
If God is good, and if He wants us to subdue this planet, and if He wants us to obey the Great Commission and conquer this world for Christ, and if He tells half the human race that they're in charge of tending the home, it follows from this that the home is actually one of the most strategic and important tools by which the world will be won.
I hate myself that I wasn't there for him. I hate that I could not feel it in him. How could I not know what had happened? How could I not hear it in his voice, his comments, or in his demeanor? He needed my help, and I couldn't feel it.
Sometimes there is no choice but to walk into your own house. Far away, you think, and you do not want to see. You come home and you say do not tell me. You say, I have hunted the elk all over the snowfields of the Selway, and I do not want to know what happened here. And then there is a morning you walk in and take a look in your own house, like any traveler.
Whatever we have in the glory of man is "away". Those are just not enough before we go "home" to the glory of God.
Homecoming is a single word, and we use it to describe a single event. But true homecoming requires more time. It seems to be a process rather than a moment. Perhaps we come home the way the earth comes home to the sun. It could be that homecoming is always a return and our understanding of home deepens with each encounter.
You yearn to stay in this in-between place, where the beauty of the times you have freshly bade farewell to is still alive and vivid in your mind – almost real – and the reality of your new circumstances has yet to fully sink in. You listen to the familiar melodies that had accompanied you on your journey, and allow the music to evoke landscapes and scenes in your mind. The songs caress your sub-consciousness and fill your being with an airy joy. You are both here and elsewhere. Or perhaps you are everywhere and nowhere.
Moments later, I was climbing nervously into the back of the car. The driver wore the archetypal expression of an antagonist. No words were exchanged beyond the brief lines uttered to this nameless stranger, whose inclinations remained unclear. The car sped along empty roads and traversed dingy alleyways. Music blared from its speakers. I did not remember exhaling throughout the entire journey.
An anchorite’s hermitage is called an anchor-hold; some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the side of a church like a barnacle to a rock. I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and keeps me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down. It’s a good place to live; there’s a lot to think about. The creeks are an active mystery, fresh every minute. Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection. The mountains are a passive mystery, the oldest of them all. Theirs is the simple mystery of creation from nothing, of matter itself, anything at all, the given. Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.
These times of war and ruin will pass, and by love, you will be renewed and all terrible things shall be undone. Do you hear me, Fin Button?” Jeannot pushed the hair from her face and though shaking yet, Fin nodded. “In the name of God I drew you from the water, and in his name shall you be delivered home.
Her mind circled Georgia, circled Ebenezer. It called up images and memories and things nearly home but never that final destination itself, as if it existed at the center of her mind, shining like a sun too radiant. She knew there was a face at the center of that radiance. A face too bright. A face she sought and longed for but could no longer bear the light of. She drifted into sleep, circling, circling, circling.
He looked into her eyes and said "When everything falls apart, and the day my soul refuses to move any further, I'll come back home. A home that fills me with courage and love. My home neither has doors and nor windows, All it have is walls. The walls that beat every second. And it has a pair of eyes too. Through which I can see this world more beautifully than I ever did".
We always become weaker when our soul gets into a stronger desire to own another. Like the way, our knees gets weaker when we see into their eyes. And the way, our hearts and minds defy every law of gravity and make us feel light and float into the infinity. The way, our soul bonds to theirs and becomes stronger. The way, their touch feels like thousands of stars bombarding together ripping us out of our senses and reality. Filling every void inside us, and how everything seems so right. Like a dream, that we never want to end. Like a dream, where we want to be lost forever and never want to find our way back home.
I breathe in... The sights and smells Of this city I’ve come to know... So well I gaze... Across the turquoise ocean Where the waves Liberate my spirit... From its shell I breathe in... The brilliant sky line Where the birds Emerge shyly From the dappled sunshine I breathe in... The gently... Blowing winds That soothe me Like a mother, around her child I breathe in... The sounds of laughter Pure and pretty Like the golden-green butterfly I’m always after I breathe in... The closeness, I have always shared With people, Who almost knew me, Almost cared I breathe in... The comfort Of my home, The safe walls, The scents of childhood On the pillows I breathe in...the silence Of my own heart Aching with tenderness... With memories.. Of home I breathe... in... The fragrance Of love, and moist sand The one... His roses left... On both my hands And I just keep on breathing Every moment As much as I can Preserving it, in my body For the day It can’t So I breathe in.. Once again.. Feeling life's energy Fizzing through my cells Never knowing What awaits me Or what's going to happen to me.. Next I breathe in This moment... Knowing it's either life Or it's death I close my eyes, And breathe in Just believing in myself.
My wife is alone in our full bed too. Her husband, the father of her children, never came back from Iraq. When I deployed the first time she asked her grandmother for advice. Her grandfather served in Africa and Europe in World War II. Her grandmother would know what to do.“How do I live with him being gone? How do I help him when he comes home?” my wife asked. “He won’t come home,” her grandmother answered. “The war will kill him one way or the other. I hope for you that he dies while he is there. Otherwise the war will kill him at home. With you.” My wife’s grandfather died of a heart attack on the living-room floor, long before she was born. It took a decade or two for World War II to kill him. When would my war kill me?
But the shock wears off, more quickly for some, but eventually for most. Fast food and alcohol are seductive, and I didn’t fight too hard. Your old routine is easy to fall back into, preferences and tastes return. It’s not hard to be a fussy, overstuffed American. After a couple of months, home is no longer foreign, and you are free to resume your old life. I thought I did. Resume my old life, that is. I was wrong.
...The happy Warrior... is he... whose powers shed round him in the common strife, or mild concerns of ordinary life, a constant influence, a peculiar grace; but who, if he be called upon to face some awful moment to which Heaven has joined great issues, good or bad for human kind, is happy as a lover; and attired with sudden brightness, like a man inspired; and, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law in calmness made, and sees what he foresaw; or if an unexpected call succeed, come when it will, is equal to the need: he who, though thus endued as with a sense and faculty for storm and turbulence, is yet a soul whose master-bias leans to homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes; sweet images! which, wheresoe'er he be, are at his heart; and such fidelity it is his darling passion to approve; more brave for this, that he hath much to love:—
He sat down on a grassy bank and looked at the city that surrounded him, and thought, one day he would have to go home. And one day he would have to make a home to go back to. He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough. He pulled out his book.
Whatever happens in the world - whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over - eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house. Wars, famine, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment - they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers, tucked into the folds of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the paint on your walls and the water in your pipes. So the history of household life isn't just a history of beds and sofas and kitchen stoves ... but of scurvy and guano and the Eiffel Tower and bedbugs and body-snatching and just about everything else that has ever happened. Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up.
ITS nomimal without all on transfer of regard, that weight of a measure of lines cannot be equal in comparison. The want of privacy is a need of personality not character. Only through devotional love not modernity can you coolect the past, present and future. Timeless is not what you think or hear. Patience is not any big reveal. Never see make how all free?
They taught the women that the home is a shame and in doing so, they successfully decomposed nations. Instead of it being the greatest honour to build a family, it became a laughingstock. And in this becoming, they successfully deconstructed nations. They taught the men that loyalty is merely an option and in doing so, they successfully destroyed nations. Instead of it being the greatest pride to love one woman, it became a joke, a funny side comment. And in this becoming, they successfully poisoned nations. Your home is your atom, your cell, your genome. Your love is your honour, your word, your truth. You wonder why we live in deconstructed nations, you ask one another why you live on torn fibres, cracked ground, and yet you continue to listen to what they tell you. You have put shame where there should be a throne, you have placed a joke where there should be a crown. You have successfully destroyed your nations.
We wander in our thousands over theface of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond theseas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to methat for each of us going home must be like going to render an account.We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends--those whom weobey, and those whom we love; but even they who have neither, the mostfree, lonely, irresponsible and bereft of ties,--even those for whomhome holds no dear face, no familiar voice,--even they have to meet thespirit that dwells within the land, under its sky, in its air, in itsvalleys, and on its rises, in its fields, in its waters and its trees--amute friend, judge, and inspirer.
Lisbon, to me, is the Lisbon of Pessoa. Just like London is Woolf’s, or rather, Mrs. Dalloway’s. Barcelona is Gaudí's and Rome is da Vinci’s. You see them in every crevice and hear their echoes in every cathedral. I’d like to be the child, or rather, the mother of a city but I neither have a home nor a resting place. My race is humankind. My religion is kindness. My work is love and, well, my city is the walls of your heart.
Don’t forget that the land is always out there, making its way, doing everything it can so you can breathe fresh air; so you can eat fresh food; so you can move and see and feel and think, and it’s on your side. The world is out there doing what it’s been doing way before you came here, it’s firm and strong and it takes a lot to bring it down.so from time to time, just go outside and look at this spectacle. This pure painting right in front of your eyes. No one created it. No one owns it. It doesn’t want anything. It doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone. It simply is. So maybe, try a little tenderness. Just give it a chance to do what it can do. Just let it help you breatheand eatand moveand seeand maybe just try to live your life in a way that doesn’t kill this force of naturethat is just trying to give you a world worth living in. A clean world. A fresh world. Paths, forests, oceans, animals, oxygen, water. That’s all it takes.Just try a little tenderness towards this world we’ve been lucky enough to build our homes on. If you take care of it, it will take care of you.
Later, Ella looked for the two swallows in the eaves outside the window, watching them even more closely now. The thought of them flying all that way, across mountains and seas and returning here, because this was their home - of them knowing how to find it - changed things. It was a new way of seeing; this was no longer just the place where women and men were kept, but the home of other creatures too, ones that had travelled far and still chosen it because this, above all other places, was the place to bring their families into the world.
Being born in a place is only one way to belong, nor do you have to die there....I knew at once that Magdala was home because I felt sighted there again, second sighted. It was not only the spring. In time everything spoke.When birds rose into the air, I could read the pattern of their wings, and the path the wind made on the water carried messages. The very ground said make a path here, plant herbs there. These vine are not dead. Tend them and they'll bear fruit again. Ancient trees offered shelter and wisdom as well as olives. And there were certain rocks that could absorb fatigue or agitation, leaving me refreshed and calm.
Michael wasn't on the pool deck, which was hard for me. None of my old Coral Springs teammates were around. Still, that old plane of cement felt like home. I folded my clothes and put them on the bench. I placed my water bottle under my starting block, and I dove in. Once again, I felt that ultimate state of transition, my feet no longer on the ground, my hands not yet in the water.
The afternoon had passed to a ghostly gray. She was struck by the immensity of things, so much water and sky and forest, and after a time it occurred to her that she’d lived a life almost entirely indoors. Her memories were indoor memories, fixed by ceilings and plastered white walls. Her whole life had been locked to geometries: suburban rectangles, city squares. First the house she’d grown up in, then dorms and apartments. The open air had been nothing but a medium of transit, a place for rooms to exist.
God speaks to you all the time ~ Have you tuned in to the cosmic vibrations of love, harmony, peace, and truth? Unless you quieten that blabbering little mind of yours, you won’t be able to listen to the Divine music that plays on and on...Just for one heavenly second, shut your eyes, ears, and mind to the cacophonous noises of this physical, illusionary, temporary world. Exit all the drama.Just for that one heavenly second, stay quiet and simply listen. Listen to the ambrosial sound. It vibrates with joy.You can have more of this soulful peace in your life, if only you choose to align yourself with the Source of Love and Light. The more you stay attuned to "Home", the less you’d wander in-vain.
But there is no Messiah of Sitka. Landsman has no home, no future, no fate but Bina. The land that he and she were promised was bounded only by the fringes of their wedding canopy, by the dog-eared corners of their cards of membership in an international fraternity whose members carry their patrimony in a tote bag, their world on the tip of the tongue.
I want you here. I want you in my home, my bed, my life,” he murmured, the smooth out of his voice, it was low and so rough with sex and emotion, it was abrasive, scoring through me.“Baby –”“I want your clothes in my closet. I wanna hear your voice in my house when you’re talkin’ on the phone. I want you sittin’ beside me when we’re watchin’ TV. I want shit you like in my fridge. I want “your razors in my shower. I want my roof over your head. Your car in my garage. I want to give you what I should have been giving you for sixteen years. As good as you deserve. A showplace. A place where I can make you happy.”God. He was killing me.“Creed, let me –”He didn’t let me finish. He pressed on, driving in, our bodies jolting with his thrusts, his voice harsh in my ear.“Give me that, Sylvie. Give me that and, swear to God, I’ll give you everything.”“I –”His head came up, his cock drove deep and stayed planted and his eyes burned into mine.“All I’ll ask. All I’ll ever ask. You give me that and you got a lifetime of nothin’ but take.
You can't be transcendent,... which will mean to be perfect in everything. You can try to act as such person, but there is a lot of to learn.- As first you always will know the few from everything- Everything is endless!- (The Wolf of Wall Street), forgot everything what people say to you about the topic "Money"...because money are the thing which make your life interesting. You could buy the best phone, the best hotel or the best room, the best house, the best car, the best TV, the best books... the best wife... There are outside a lot of women which will sleep with you in replace of money... so reality you need money to have them... (More far than this I can't take you, because the train is too fast It will delete everything.... <----- it will just start from here.)... What I gonna say or I will say is "Good Luck and try by yourself the finish the mission".
My city. I pondered that phrase, wondered why Barrons felt that way. He never said “our world.” He always said “your world.” But he called Dublin his city. Merely because he’d been in it so long? Or had Barrons, like me, been beguiled by her tawdry grace, fallen for her charm and colorful dualities?I looked around “my” bookstore. That was what I called it. Did we call the things of our heart our own, whether they were or not?
The shield wall reeks of shit, and all a man wants is to be home, to be anywhere but on this field that prepares for battle, but none of us will turn and run or else we will be despised for ever. We pretend we want to be there, and when the wall at last advances, step by step, and the heart is thumping fast as a bird’s wing beating, the world seems unreal.
A man or woman who travels in the end will never be kept. But if you understand that person well enough, they’ll always be by your side. They might have forgotten where their home is in this world - but you might just make them feel like the closest thing to feeling at home. And while they’ll be leaving country after country, this is the way you will never leave their heart.
Take a shower. Wash away every trace of yesterday. Of smells. Of weary skin. Get dressed. Make coffee, windows open, the sun shining through. Hold the cup with two hands and notice that you feel the feeling of warmth. You still feel warmth. Now sit down and get to work. Keep your mind sharp, head on, eyes on the page and if small thoughts of worries fight their ways into your consciousness: threw them off like fires in the night and keep your eyes on the track. Nothing but the task in front of you. Get off your chair in the middle of the day. Put on your shoes and take a long walk on open streets around people. Notice how they’re all walking, in a hurry, or slowly. Smiling, laughing, or eyes straight forward, hurried to get to wherever they’re going. And notice how you’re just one of them. Not more, not less. Find comfort in the way you’re just one in the crowd. Your worries: no more, no less.Go back home. Take the long way just to not pass the liquor store. Don’t buy the cigarettes. Go straight home. Take off your shoes. Wash your hands. Your face. Notice the silence. Notice your heart. It’s still beating. Still fighting. Now get back to work. Work with your mind sharp and eyes focused and if any thoughts of worries or hate or sadness creep their ways around, shake them off like a runner in the night for you own your mind, and you need to tame it. Focus. Keep it sharp on track, nothing but the task in front of you.Work until your eyes are tired and head is heavy, and keep working even after that. Then take a shower, wash off the day. Drink a glass of water. Make the room dark. Lie down and close your eyes. Notice the silence. Notice your heart. Still beating. Still fighting. You made it, after all. You made it, another day. And you can make it one more. You’re doing just fine. You’re doing fine.I’m doing just fine.
I am clumsy, drop glasses and get drunk on Monday afternoons. I read Seneca and can recite Shakespeare by heart, but I mess up the laundry, don’t answer my phone and blame the world when something goes wrong. I think I have a dream, but most of the days I’m still sleeping. The grass is cut. It smells like strawberries. Today I finished four books and cleaned my drawers. Do you believe in a God? Can I tell you about Icarus? How he flew too close to the sun?I want to make coming home your favourite part of the day. I want to leave tiny little words lingering in your mind, on nights when you’re far away and can’t sleep. I want to make everything around us beautiful; make small things mean a little more. Make you feel a little more. A little better, a little lighter. The coffee is warm, this cup is yours. I want to be someone you can’t live without.I want to be someone you can’t live without.
A man that knows your worth doesn't need to be told how to treat you. That's a given! You won't have to question his feelings, his motives, nor his intentions. How will I know? You ask. See, he will freely show you how he feels and prove it consistently. If you're settling for anything less than what you deserve. Then, maybe you don't even know your worth.
Three Pines wasn’t on any tourist map, being too far off any main or even secondary road. Like Narnia, it was generally found unexpectedly and with a degree of surprise that such an elderly village should have been hiding in this valley all along. Anyone fortunate enough to find it once usually found their way back.
Somewhere beyond all that, on an unseeable horizon, was Morrighan and all the people who lived there, going about their lives, unaware. My brothers. Pauline. Berdi. Gwyneth. And more patrols like Walther's who would meet their deaths, as unaware as I had once been. I want to go with you. Where I was going was no place for Natiya. It was hardly a place for me.
Ay, you've already seen that you and your master aren't quite at home in this world, at least not like before.' Terence nodded slowly. 'It'll only get stronger, too,' Robin continued. 'Soon you'll find yourself looking into people's eyes to see if they've been there. And once you find someone who has, you'll greet him as a long-lost friend and take him to your heart.
Fathers are ironic, they want democracy in their country but dictatorship in their home.
Peace and gladness in every home is a peace for the society, nation and the world.
Sure, Nico had mixed emotions about the camp. He’d felt rejected there, out of place, unwanted and unloved … but now that it was on the verge of destruction, he realized how much it meant to him. This was the last place Bianca and he had shared as a home – the only place they’d ever felt safe, even if only temporarily.
By remaining constrained in one's environment or country or family, one has little chance of being other than the original prescription. By leaving, one gains a perspective, a distance of both space and time, which is essential for writing about family or home, in any case.
Her eyes opened at this sight against her will and she looked around the room almost in fear. But it was dark and shadowy, shaded by the bamboo screen at the door, the damp rush mats at the windows, the old heavy curtains and the spotted, peeling walls, and in their shade she saw how she loved him, loved Raja and Tara and all of them who had lived in this house with her. There could be no love more deep and full and wide than this one, she knew. No other love had started so far back in time and had had so much time in which to grow and spread. They were really all parts of her, inseparable, so many aspects of her as she was of them, so that the anger or the disappointment she felt in them was only the anger and disappointment she felt at herself. Whatever hurt they felt, she felt. Whatever diminished them, diminished her. What attacked them, attacked her. Nor was there anyone else on earth whom she was willing to forgive more readily or completely, or defend more instinctively and instantly. She could hardly believe, at that moment, that she would Iive on after they did or they would continue after she had ended. If such an unimaginable phenomenon could take place, then surely they would remain flawed, damaged for life. The wholeness of the pattern, its perfection, would be gone.She lay absolutely still, almost ceasing to breathe, afraid to diminish by even a breath the wholeness of that love.
Mom has reorganized the kitchen so that the one room that was everyone's room is foreign to me. My visits are punctuated with me whipping around, angrily demanding, "Where are the forks, WHY DID YOU MOVE THE FORKS?" and she has to calmly open the drawer on the other side of the kitchen as if she moved it just to ruin my life. I just found out where she puts the bowls and their new location feels like such a personal attack that I can barely talk about it without raising my blood pressure.
The only thing that gave me comfort in the attic was thinking about my family. Now I'm home, but it's not the home I imagined. Not the family I imagined. I'd convinced myself that they'd continued on with their happy, carefree lives without me, that they were doing it double, because I couldn't do it at all. I was wrong.
Alexa's face whitens. The coil of hair loosens itself from her finger. "You did it for me. You never fought back. Because you thought you were keeping me safe."I pull up my gaze to meet hers. "Yeah.""I--" It's a strangled, high-pitched sound, laced with shock and grief. Then she bites her lips shut. Her chin trembles, just once, before she turns away.
I used to play a game where I imagined that someone had abandoned me in a strange place & I had to find my way back home-I thought I could do it blind, the same way a lost dog might trek a thousand miles to return to its owner, relying on some mysterious instinct that drew the heart back to where it belonged.
Coming home to someone is many things. It is a literal action, an abstract idea, a physical feeling. It is more than the sound of the key turning in the door and the voice that calls from the porch. It is a choice, a promise, a declaration. It is a return, not as a person to a place, but as oneself to another. It is one person saying to another person: You are the one I choose.
I remember our childhood dayswhen life was easyand math problems hard.Mom would help us with our homeworkand dad was not at home but at work.After our chores, we’d go to the old fort museum with clips in our hair and pure joy in our hearts.You, sister, wore the bangles thatyou, brother, got as a prize from the Dentist.“Why the bangles?” the Dentist asked, surprised, for boys picked the stickers of cars instead.“They’re for my sisters,” you said.Mom would treat us to a bottle of Coke,a few sips each. Then,we’d buy the sweet smelling bread from the same white vanand hand-in-hand,we’d walk to our small flat above the restaurant.I remember our childhood days.Do you remember them too?
Of course, it’s now obvious why he was so angry that day. People don’t move into hospice to live but to die. And that half an egg sandwich I ended up making him–that sandwich was the last meal he ate in our Haight-Ashbury apartment, our one true home.
It will no longer be necessary to leave one's own home in order to find work in the surrounding districts, which means spending week after week away from home, for no matter how restless a fellow might be, his own home, if he has a wife he respects and children he loves, has the same satisfying taste as bread, a man's home is not for all hours, but he soon begins to miss it if he does not go back there every day.
That's what so many people didn't understand about life. The real world is the one within the walls of homes; the outside world, of careers and politics and money and fame, that was the fake world, where nothing lasted, and things were real only to the extent they harmed or helped people inside their homes.
I have made you some things, for when you get back. I understand now, all the baking you sent me, stale and crumbled in brown paper and rough twine. Now you’re away and I am here. So I will make and make until you get back to remind you, and myself: there are reasons to come home.
I acknowledge that a wife does (and should) exercise a degree of control in the family and home; but what I present is not a constructive form aimed at supporting a healthy relationship, but a destructive form that—whether intended or not—destroys a relationship through the invocation of fear and flight rather than love and commitment. I also propose that this method or “device” (as I have called it) was learned in part from a very young age from her parents.
We are earthbound creatures, Maggie had thought. No matter how tempting the sky. No matter how beautiful the stars. No matter how deep the dream of flight. We are creatures of the earth. Born with legs, not wings, legs that root us to the earth, and hands that allow us to build our homes, hands that bind us to our loved ones within those homes. The glamour, the adrenaline rush, the true adventure, is here, within these homes. The wars, the detente, the coups, the peace treaties, the celebrations, the mournings, the hunger, the sating, all here.
Children nurtured in kindness learn the value of understanding. Children taught to be self-sufficient, to respect others, to value education and to build life up rather than to tear it down will become adults capable of leading us to a brighter future. For (as Karl Menninger noted) what's done to children, they will do to society.
She hesitated, wiping her hands off on her apron. “I’m not sure if I’ll be here when you get back. This place is a little—it’s a little much for me.”She didn’t have to tell him how it was. He had lived here for years, in a house that wanted to be silent until the silence was broken by a certain step and a certain voice, in a house holding its breath for someone’s return. If anyone held their breath long enough, they were dead.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
You will never really get, how really everything works in my world. How the colour of the sky changes every now and then, and how deep the sea gets in there. How volcanoes and rivers flow together, and how demons and angels fall in love in there. How stormy a night can get and how bright a day can be. How ruined the home is, but how vibrant the feelings are in there.
Sometimes in life you find love so powerful that you get tunnel vision. You only see the one you love, the one you desire. No one or no thing gets in the way of what you feel. A love so strong which makes you feel invincible in this world. And, everywhere you go, all the people can see you glow.
Not long ago, I learned that if I let other people tell me how God was supposed to work in my life I would be dead. If I would have given into someone else’s version of God then I would have done nothing to improve my situation. The notion that “if it was meant to be, it will be”, is a pacifying, yet harmful quote, that many spiritualists use to soften the blow of anger. God is not passive. He is relentless, and he will build you through fire. He will put in your heart a need for answers. The intensity of what bothers your soul is often his voice trying to take you from the limited vision of mankind to the full view of the best life he would like to offer you. He is above any pastor, any bishop, any prophet, any church, any cleverly crafted sermon or multi-meaning verse. He is the master of his craft and the author of your forever. Inner peace is only found through action. Fear may darken the trail, but the light of peace stands at the end of such a journey ----waiting with truth.
But when you’re a kid, it isn’t chaos. It’s just a heartbeat. Your house isn’t floating through space, it sits on the ground. Once you get old enough you start to see that color is just paint and doors are just wood. Then, at some point, that feeling of home vanishes entirely. And… that’s what I fear. That nothing will ever make me feel like I’m safe again. That once you leave home, you never get it back.
I know nothing I’m doing is important,' he said. 'Sure, I’m just a waste product of history. Maybe nothing I’m doing is even real, after all. But I was born right here, in this old house, and I look out the window and know what I’m seeing, and I know some people I like to be with, and I like what I do all day long, and maybe that’s all that realness is, anyway
Her name had the likeness of a name. She had the likeness of a woman, with hands but no face at all, since she never let herself see it. She had the likeness of a life, because she was all alone in it. She lived in the likeness of a house, with walls and a roof and a door that kept nothing in and nothing out.
Taking trips tore all of us up inside, for they seemed, each journey away from home, something that might have been less selfishly undertaken, or something that would test us, or something that had better be momentous, to justify such a leap into the dark. The torment and guilt - the torment of having the loved one go, the guilt of being the loved one gone - comes into my fiction as it did and does in my life. And most of all the guilt then was because it was true: I had left to arrive at some future and secret joy, at what was unknown, and what was no in New York, waiting to be discovered. My joy was connected with my writing; that was as much as I knew.
Dig Deep! When the task at hand seems to be very difficult. Dig Deep! Whenever you feel you're drifting away from your intended course. Dig Deep! When others doubt you and say it can't be done. Dig Deep! Whenever you feel like giving up. Dig Deep! When life throws you a curve ball. If you quit, you'll never hit that homerun
Today is a new day! Let today be the day you free your mind from the prison of self doubt. Your thoughts can either hinder you or propel you to the next level. Precautions are necessary to maintain your safety and well-being. But fear and precautions are two different things. When you are afraid your doubt is increased. Do what makes you happy in order to satisfy the core of your existence. Fear: to be afraid of something or someone whether the threat is real or imaginedPrecaution: a measure taken in advance to prevent something from happening, prudent foresightDoubt:a feeling of uncertainty or lack of conviction
When reading the history of the Jewish people, of their flight from slavery to death, of their exchange of tyrants, I must confess that my sympathies are all aroused in their behalf. They were cheated, deceived and abused. Their god was quick-tempered unreasonable, cruel, revengeful and dishonest. He was always promising but never performed. He wasted time in ceremony and childish detail, and in the exaggeration of what he had done. It is impossible for me to conceive of a character more utterly detestable than that of the Hebrew god. He had solemnly promised the Jews that he would take them from Egypt to a land flowing with milk and honey. He had led them to believe that in a little while their troubles would be over, and that they would soon in the land of Canaan, surrounded by their wives and little ones, forget the stripes and tears of Egypt. After promising the poor wanderers again and again that he would lead them in safety to the promised land of joy and plenty, this God, forgetting every promise, said to the wretches in his power:—'Your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness and your children shall wander until your carcasses be wasted.' This curse was the conclusion of the whole matter. Into this dust of death and night faded all the promises of God. Into this rottenness of wandering despair fell all the dreams of liberty and home. Millions of corpses were left to rot in the desert, and each one certified to the dishonesty of Jehovah. I cannot believe these things. They are so cruel and heartless, that my blood is chilled and my sense of justice shocked. A book that is equally abhorrent to my head and heart, cannot be accepted as a revelation from God.When we think of the poor Jews, destroyed, murdered, bitten by serpents, visited by plagues, decimated by famine, butchered by each, other, swallowed by the earth, frightened, cursed, starved, deceived, robbed and outraged, how thankful we should be that we are not the chosen people of God. No wonder that they longed for the slavery of Egypt, and remembered with sorrow the unhappy day when they exchanged masters. Compared with Jehovah, Pharaoh was a benefactor, and the tyranny of Egypt was freedom to those who suffered the liberty of God.While reading the Pentateuch, I am filled with indignation, pity and horror. Nothing can be sadder than the history of the starved and frightened wretches who wandered over the desolate crags and sands of wilderness and desert, the prey of famine, sword, and plague. Ignorant and superstitious to the last degree, governed by falsehood, plundered by hypocrisy, they were the sport of priests, and the food of fear. God was their greatest enemy, and death their only friend.It is impossible to conceive of a more thoroughly despicable, hateful, and arrogant being, than the Jewish god. He is without a redeeming feature. In the mythology of the world he has no parallel. He, only, is never touched by agony and tears. He delights only in blood and pain. Human affections are naught to him. He cares neither for love nor music, beauty nor joy. A false friend, an unjust judge, a braggart, hypocrite, and tyrant, sincere in hatred, jealous, vain, and revengeful, false in promise, honest in curse, suspicious, ignorant, and changeable, infamous and hideous:—such is the God of the Pentateuch.
There would be times in the years to come when he ( Murphy ) would accompany me back and forth between the two worlds I'd come to know. Other times, Yipes would venture out over the water, and even Matilda came along once. There were loads of clothes and seeds and jars of honey and other such things cramping our space, and children of every age moving between the pillars and The Land of Elyon. And always, always, there was Marco at the pedals, helping guide the way across the Lonely Sea. I have yet to venture off the course that was set for me by Sir Alistair Wakefield, but I see certain things on the old maps that make me curious. Are there other places to explore, somewhere in the immeasurable reaches of the Lonely Sea? Maybe my own children or their children will find these strange spots on the map. My way is set an in stone, and I don't feel the need to veer off any longer. It has taken many days of searching and fighting, but in the end I have found what I was looking for. I have found my way home.
LOOKINGThe world goes by, and what have I to do with it? I merely observe how the geese stretch their necks towards the orange rim of sky. I watch how light fades and children make their way home, hungry and tired. The bushes outside become ghosts while baths run and kitchen windows steam up with the cooking. This is the smell of our home, where I have a place in the wrinkled hours making beds and hugging boys awake. This is the sound of the house where I feel out lives into words, translate ragged nights and days into something whole, or try to. You may look if you wish..... The world goes by, and what have you or I to do with it, except perhaps for looking... ?
It is impossible to estimate full influence of the reading of the Word in a home day after day and year after year. It filters into the hearts of the young. It is absorbed into their souls. It colors all their thoughts. It is wrought into the very fiber of their minds. It imbues them with its own spirit. It’s holy teachings become the principles of their lives, which rule their conduct and shape all their actions.
The one plus side to demonic infestation is that children cannot be harmed by a demon. The sanctified aura of a child somehow repels the demon and they can only oppress them if the parent makes a contract allowing them to do so. Because they can be very clever in tricking people into agreeing to additional contracts, it is important to never converse with a demon. Either call in a priest or move out as soon as possible.
Then I probably fainted. The woman at the registration desk managed to put on a sympathetic expression afterward, as if she wanted to ask, "What are you going to do now?" I told her not to worry, I was really leaving, I was going home.But go home where? Without my children I no longer had a home.
As we embrace the mystery of love, we see that it contains not an absence of error, but the presence of grace. It contains not the absence of anger or pain, but the presence of forgiveness and healing. Not the absence of disharmony or confusion, but the presence of peace and clarity.To make a home into a sanctuary, we must be willing to make room in our hearts for one another's limitations, as well as our gifts. For it is here in this sacred space of the home and family, so brimming with life, so full of every emotion available to our hearts, that we learn what it means to love within all the nuances of an intimate relationship.
If telling men "don't rape" instead of telling women "don't get raped", is like telling thieves "don't steal" instead of home owners to "lock your houses", why don't we hear more victims of home invasion being told "you got what you deserved for having such a beautiful house on display for everyone to see" ???
I have drunk the night and swallowed the stars. I am dancing with abandon and singing with rapture. There is not a thing I do not love. There is not a person I have not forgiven. I feel a universe of love. I feel a universe of light. Tonight, I am with old friends and we are returning home. The moon is our witness.
Home? What is home? Home is where a house is that you come back to when the rainy season is about to begin, to wait until the next dry season comes around. Home is where your woman is, that you come back to in the intervals between a greater love - the only real love - the lust for riches buried in the earth, that are your own if you can find them.Perhaps you do not call it home, even to yourself. Perhaps you call them 'my house,' 'my woman,' What if there was another 'my house,' 'my woman,' before this one? It makes no difference. This woman is enough for now.Perhaps the guns sounded too loud at Anzio or at Omaha Beach, at Guadalcanal or at Okinawa. Perhaps when they stilled again some kind of strength had been blasted from you that other men still have. And then again perhaps it was some kind of weakness that other men still have. What is strength, what is weakness, what is loyalty, what is perfidy?The guns taught only one thing, but they taught it well: of what consequence is life? Of what consequence is a man? And, therefore, of what consequence if he tramples love in one place and goes to find it in the next? The little moment that he has, let him be at peace, far from the guns and all that remind him of them.So the man who once was Bill Taylor has come back to his house, in the dusk, in the mountains, in Anahuac. ("The Moon Of Montezuma")
12. There will come a day, much quicker than your parents would wish, when you will no longer be comfortable living at home. You will want to move out and establish a home of your own. After that time, your mother and father will be more like your friends than your parents. And someday, if they live long enough, you will be more like a parent to them than a son or daughter.
We live in that grave, in those clothes, in the pressure between nothing and everything, we live by perpetual movement from place to place but we want oh we so much want to escape to say it all to come home at last to the right place our rightful place our rightful space. As if that was possible.
Finally Exi spoke. "There are some important things to remember always, no matter how hard life presses at you. One of these things is that wherever you are, and no matter for how long, there must be a home to hold you. You cannot know who you are unless you are contained in some way that gives you shape. Otherwise you are like a small wind, or like water losing itself in sand." He paused thoughtfully, looking at us, who had all stopped to listen. "You see," he continued, "at any place or time we have no way of knowing if we will be there a day or a week. We must let our destiny come to us. In one sense this is always true. Therefore it is needful for each of us to be defined-to live, not just wait to live. Do you understand?
I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.
You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use— silence, exile, and cunning.
There is something in this January Siberian landscape that overpowers, oppresses, stuns. Above all, it is its enormity, its boundlessness, its oceanic limitlessness. The earth has no end here; the world has no end. Man is no created for such measureless. For him a comfortable, palpable, serviceable measure is the measure of his village, his field, street, house. At sea, the size of the ship's deck will be such a measure. Man is created for the kind of space that he can traverse at one try, with a single effort.
Here is the time for the sayable, here is its home.Speak and attest. More than everthe things we can live with are falling away,and ousting them, filling their place, a will with no image.Will beneath crusts which readily crackwhenever the act inside swells and seeks new borders.
... but I could also write about love. How a hand can silence thousands of voices and how someone’s smell can make you feel at home even though you’re a million miles away fromhomeand have you ever hurt someone you love? Because you’re angry. Because you’re disappointed and sad and you just really wanted to love and be loved in returnbut life got in the way and you both said things that should never be said and you’re angry but don’t know how to. Because you still feel this strange love for him, but you’re also fucking angry and you want to hit him, but then hug him because hurting him is hurting yourself, and then hit him again because you’re angry! and so you fall on your knees because you’re hopeless to yourself and your own emotionsand that’s love, my friend.
And she looked upon the mirror that was given as a gift. She hated everything about it, from the circular size of it, to the color, and the wooden frame that held it in place. But mostly, she hated looking at herself. Especially into this one that had a scratch on its glass surface, which would reflect back to her face. And as she looked, it would cut her as the words her father would often say, in telling her she was ugly.
My cheeks are red hot,my lip still trembles,because I sent my heartto speak; every word of itdelusional and awkward,an exuberance, an abrupt sound.That's how I spoke, oh, it stillshows on my hot cheeksI'm now carrying home.I look down at the snowand walk past many houses,past many hedges, many trees,the snow adorns hedge, tree and house.I walk on, staring downat the snow, on my cheeksnothing but red-hot memoryreminding me of my wild talk.
Sticking to one person for a lifetime is not a waste of time or lack of better ones, it means you've found your place of eternity.
I don't really care if people forget me. My legacy wasn't about me. It was about everything I could do for another. When that sinks in...well you try a little harder. You dream a little broader. Your heart stretches a little farther and you find that you can't go back to the same place and make it fit. You become a person of ideas and seek out your own kind. And then it happens: One day you discover that staying the same is scary and changing has become your new home.
I need a break after school," she told me later. "School is hard because a lot of people are in the room, so you get tired. I freak out if my mom plans a play date without telling me, because I don't want to hurt my friends' feelings. But I'd rather stay home. At a friend's house you have to do the things other people want to do. I like hanging out with my mom after school because I can learn from her. She's been alive longer than me. We have thoughtful conversations. I like having conversations because they make people happy.
Cutting my roots and leaving my home and family when I was 18 years old forced me to build my home in other things, like my music, stories and my journey. The last years I have more or less constantly been on my way, on the road, always leaving and never arriving, which also means leaving people. I’ve loved and lost and I have regrets and I miss and no matter how many times you leave, start over, achieve success or travel places it’s other people that matter. People, friends, family, lovers, strangers – they will forever stay with you, even if only through memory. I’ve grown to appreciate people to the deepest core and I’m trying to learn how to tell people what I want to tell them when I have the chance, before it’s too late. …
It is not an unusual life curve for Westerners - to live i n and be shaped by the bigness, sparseness, space clarity & hopefulness of the West, to go away for study and enlargement and the perspective that distance and dissatisfaction can give, and then to return to what pleases the sight and enlists the loyalty and demands the commitment.
No, I stay for myself. Everything I need, everything I want, is here. I know it's not enough for most people, but it is for me. Every time I leave, even for an afternoon or an overnight trip to Seattle, I can't wait to get back. This is home. And I guess I'm a person who needs a home, a place to plant seeds and watch them grow.
Light and the human is poorly understood by the astronomicalprofession, with many astronomers not understanding which light bulbs they should have in their ownhomes and offices! It is embarrassing that astronomers do not understand the many forms of artificiallighting that they are exposed to every day and how it affects them.
After a spent day, Iwalked back in a fever.The whole way homethe sun touched my cheeks.The blissful evening glowspread across the meadowsand I called this lightthe blood I shed.My hot burning blood layconsoling the entire world.So I walked with pride--Now that all was tilled.I didn't know what was happening,I leaned against a fence post,in my blood that coveredthe meadows near and far.
We must experience Heaven on earth;May your homes, surroundings and work places portray a safe clean environment.
You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.
How do you go to your own house when something has gone bad on the inside, when it doesn't seem like your place to live anymore, when you almost cannot recall living there although it was the place you mostly ate and slept for all your grown-up life? Try to remember two or three things about living there. Try to remember cooking one meal.
He crosses the front room, which he calls his study, and comes down the staircase. The stairs turn a corner; they are narrow and steep. You can touch both handrails with your elbows, and you have to bend your head, even if, like George, you are only five eight. This is a tightly planned little house. He often feels protected by its smallness; there is hardly room enough here to feel lonely. Nevertheless.
I may have smiled to myself as I watched the familiar pattern of the town pass, the bus cruising through shade to sunshine. I'd grown up in this place, had the knowledge of it so deep in me that I didn't even know most street names, navigating instead by landmarks, visual or memorial. The corner where my mother had twisted her ankle in a mauve pantsuit. The copse of trees that always looked vaguely attended by evil. The drugstore with its torn awning. Through the window of that unfamiliar bus, the burr of old carpet under my legs, my hometown seemed scrubbed clean of my presence. It was easy to leave it behind.
This is my home, Cape Breton is my home, and I don’t know if I really want to leave it as much as I might think and I’m sort of scared to leave it all behind, everything I’ve lived with, I have so many memories of all the things I’ve done here and I’m afraid if I leave, I might lose all my memories…
When I was in junior high school, I used to think that Disney's 1990's paranormal television program 'So Weird' was every kid's ideal life - not going to school, living on a tour bus, having rockstar parents, traveling all over North America and never staying in one place for more than a week or so. Of course, eventually the realization hits you that the kids out there who really do live like this, pulling up stakes every week and never staying with their friends or having a permanent residence, aren't really happy.
All my life, I have been searching for a home," the drow said quietly. "All my life, I have been wanting more than that which was offered to me, more than Menzoberranzan, more than friends who stood beside me out of personal gain. I always thought home would be a place, and indeed it is, but not in any physical sense. It is a place in here," Drizzt said, putting a hand to his heart and turning back to look upon his companions. "It is a feeling given by true friends.I know this now, and know that I am home.""But ye're off to Carradoon," Cattie-brie said softly."And so're we!" Bruenor bellowed.Drizzt smiled at them, laughed aloud. "If circumstances will not allow me to remain at home," the ranger said firmly, "then I will simply take my home with me!
And friends abroad must bear in mindFriends at home they leave behind.Oh, I shall be stiff and coldWhen I forget you, hearts of gold;The land where I shall mind you notIs the land where all's forgot.And if my foot returns no moreTo Teme nor Corve nor Severn shore,Luck, my lads, be with you stillBy falling stream and standing hill,By chiming tower and whispering tree,Men that made a man of me.About your work in town and farmStill you'll keep my head from harm,Still you'll help me, hands that gaveA grasp to friend me to the grave.
Indeed the mind of Ilúvatar concerning you is not known to the Valar, and he has not revealed all things that are to come. But this we hold to be true, that your home is not here, neither in the land of Aman nor anywhere within the Circles of the World. And the Doom of Men, that they should depart, was at first a gift of Ilúvatar. It became a grief to them only because coming under the shadow of Morgoth it seemed to them that they were surrounded by a great darkness, of which they grew afraid; and some grew wilful and proud and would not yield, until life was reft from them.
Friendship isn't partying with a group of people to get drunk or chatting with him/her once a week, it's exactly the opposite. Friends make sure you get home safely and they help you when you need it, no matter the scenario. They don't care about what clothes you wear or what you look like, and they don't last for a day. Real friends are more interested in what direction your life is headed rather than your popularity. They care about what you have to say and how you feel, and once you meet this person you'll know it without having to think twice.
We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams. A psychoanalyst should, therefore, turn his attention to this simple localization of our memories. I should like to give the name of topoanalysis to this auxiliary of pyschoanalysis. Topoanalysis, then would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.
I lived here once," the author said after a moment."Here? For a long time?""No. For just a little while when I was young.""It must have been rather cramped.""I didn't notice.""Would you like to try it again?""No. And I couldn't if I wanted to."He shivered slightly and closed the windows. As they went downstairs, the visitor said, half apologetically: "It's really just like all houses, isn't it?"The author nodded."I didn't think it was when I built it, but in the end I suppose it's just like other houses after all.
Home is a desk. The amalgamation of a dream. Home is the cats, my books, and my work never done. All the lost things that may one day call to me, the faces of my children who will one day call to me. Maybe we can't draw flesh from reverie nor retrieve a dusty spur, but we can gather the dream itself and bring it back uniquely whole.
I didn't say another word to Mama that night, but I could feel something good even then: the YES in my heart, the swirling-around in my belly, the prickly tingling all the way from the freckle on my finger to the tip of my pinky toe. That much wonderful could only mean one thing: There was still magic in Midnight Gulch.
The messengers of Jesus will be hated to the end of time. They will be blamed for all the division which rend cities and homes. Jesus and his disciples will be condemned on all sides for undermining family life, and for leading the nation astray; they will be called crazy fanatics and disturbers of the peace. The disciples will be sorely tempted to desert their Lord. But the end is also near, and they must hold on and persevere until it comes. Only he will be blessed who remains loyal to Jesus and his word until the end.
She said, "Daddy thinks that all the world's magic is almost evolved out."I thought of Roebuck Lake, its swamps and sloughs and loblollies and breaks of cypress and cane, its sunken treetops and stobs and bream beds and sleepy gar rolling over and over and over, its baptizing pools and bridges and mussels and mosquitoes and turkey vultures and, now in the drought, the gray flaking mud-flats and logs crowded with turtles and sometimes a fat snake yawning its tame old cottony mouth like a well-fed dog in a pen.I said, "Is that what the freak show is?"She said, "Dirty miracles.
In my own shire, if I was sadHomely comforters I had:The earth, because my heart was sore,Sorrowed for the son she bore;And standing hills, long to remain,Shared their short-lived comrade's pain.And bound for the same bourn as I,On every road I wandered by,Trod beside me, close and dear,The beautiful and death-struck year:Whether in the woodland brownI heard the beechnut rustle down,And saw the purple crocus paleFlower about the autumn dale;Or littering far the fields of MayLady-smocks a-bleaching lay,And like a skylit water stoodThe bluebells in the azured wood. Yonder, lightening other loads,The season range the country roads,But here in London streets I kenNo such helpmates, only men;And these are not in plight to bear,If they would, another's care.They have enough as 'tis: I seeIn many an eye that measures meThe mortal sickness of a mindToo unhappy to be kind.Undone with misery, all they canIs to hate their fellow man;And till they drop they needs must stillLook at you and wish you ill.
When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean it IS brighter and lovelier; it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on.
I think about what the man at the Coney joint said. He was right. We are the people who stay. We stay in our homes and pay them off. We stay at our jobs. We do our thirty and come home to stay even more. We stay until we are no longer able to mow our lawns and our gutters sag with saplings, until our houses look haunted to the neighborhood children. We like it where we are. I guess then the other question is: Why do we even travel? There can only be one answer to that: we travel to appreciate home. (p.97)
When we’ve been travelling around I’ve often thought: Oh, this would be a good place to be, and that would be an excellent place to live. And yet, after I’ve seen everything I’ve decided that home, wherever that may be, is the place for feelings of peace. And if I can be at peace with myself then that is the most important thing. I think travelling teaches one that.
O enchanted land of my childhood, a cultural petri dish from which regularly issues forth greatness. New Jersey, in case you didn't know it, has got beaches. And they're not all crawling with roid-raging trolls with reality shows. I grew up summering on those beaches and they are awesome. Jersey's got farmland, beautiful bedroom communities where that woman from "Real Housewives" who looks like Dr. Zaius does not live nor anyone like her. Even the refineries, the endless cloverleaves of turnpikes and expressway twisting and unknowable patterns over the wetlands that are to me somehow beautiful. To know Jersey is to love her.
I’ve heard that when you’re in a life-or-death situation, like a car accident or a gunfight, all your senses shoot up to almost superhuman level, everything slows down, and you’re hyper-aware of what’s happening around you.As the shuttle careens toward the earth, the exact opposite is true for me.Everything silences, even the screams and shouts from the people on the other side of the metal door, the crashes that I pray aren’t bodies, the hissing of rockets, Elder’s cursing, my pounding heartbeat.I feel nothing—not the seat belt biting into my flesh, not my clenching jaw, nothing. My whole body is numb.Scent and taste disappear.The only thing about my body that works is my eyes,and they are filled with the image before them. The ground seems to leap up at us as we hurtle toward it. Through the blurry image of the world below us, I see the outline of land—a continent. And at once, my heart lurches with the desire to know this world, to make it our home. My eyes drink up the image of the planet—and my stomach sinks with the knowledge that this is a coastline I’ve never seen before. I could spin a globe of Earth around and still be able to recognize the way Spain and Portugal reach into the Atlantic, the curve of the Gulf of Mexico, the pointy end of India. But this continent—it dips and curves in ways I don’t recognize, swirls into an unknown sea, creating peninsulas in shapes I do not know, scattering out islands in a pattern I cannot connect.And it’s not until I see this that I realize: this world may one day become our home,but it will never be the home I left behind.
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.
We'd all be lucky in life if we had the chance to experience an unexpected adventure, and then make our way back safely to a place of comfort. Sometimes the only way we can appreciate our home and the simple happiness it has to offer is to be away from it for a while.
When it was time to board my flight, I took one last glance back. I knew that I had everything with me so it was not a "make sure I have everything" glance. It was more like a parting glance to Philadelphia, my home, America- for I would not be coming back for ten months. (Ch 5- Twenty in Paris)
One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.
We are homeless enough in this world under the best of circumstances without going to any special effort to test our capacity to be more so.
I used to be fine in my lonelinessbut somethingor someonesnapped me out of itand showed me company. What it’s like to feel at home,and so the going on by myself part wasn’t as easy anymore.Seasons happened and things got colder and harder and suddenly I found myself smoking circles in the airby myself in the snowand I was not okay.
it will make sense the moment you come Home. I could see it all so clearly. I could see what it is that we are waiting for. I knew in one solitary moment why I had learned obedience and why I valued nothing on the earth but love. It’s all that matters. It is all there is.
I used to walk out, at night, to the breakwater which divides the end of the harbor form the broad moor of the salt marsh. There was nothing to block the wind that had picked up speed and vigor from its Atlantic crossing. I’d study the stars in their brilliant blazing, the diaphanous swath of the milk Way, the distant glow of Boston backlighting the clouds on the horizon as if they’d been drawn there in smudgy charcoal. I felt, perhaps for the first time, particularly American, embedded in American history, here at the nation’s slender tip. Here our westering impulse, having flooded the continent and turned back, finds itself face to face with the originating Atlantic, November’s chill, salt expanses, what Hart Crane called the “unfettered leewardings,” here at the end of the world.
I didn't mind what she called me, what anybody called me. But this was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much: a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were, they had all my memories.
Although claiming my true identity as a child of God, I still live as though the God to whom I am returning demands an explanation. I still think about his love as conditional and about home as a place I am not yet fully sure of. While walking home, I keep entertaining doubts about whether I will be truly welcome when I get there. As I look at my spiritual journey, my long and fatiguing trip home, I see how full it is of guilt about the past and worries about the future. I realize my failures and know that I have lost the dignity of my sonship, but I am not yet able to fully believe that where my failings are great, 'grace is always greater.' Still clinging to my sense of worthlessness, I project for myself a place far below that which belongs to the son, (p. 52).
But the thing which had made him fall for her, fall properly, was the way she seemed so calm and so quiet and so sad. Surrounded by noisy bankers showing off, and their variously pushy or beady or anxious or competitive wives, she seemed to be from somewhere else; a place where people carried their own burdens; a grander and realer and more honourable place. Roger didn't know that Matya spent a lot of that evening thinking about home, but he could tell that she was thinking about something, and it was that other thing which, for him, did it.
This land, although not my native land,Will be remembered forever.And the sea's lightly iced,Unsalty water.The sand on the bottom is whiter than chalk,The air is heady, like wine,And the rosy body of the pinesIs naked in the sunset hour.And the sunset itself on such waves of etherThat I just can't comprehendWhether it is the end of the day, the end of the world,Or the mystery of mysteries in me again.
Belle, go. If I was your age, I wouldn't have hesitated for a moment. You will always come back here, and I will always be here. And we will have those talks we need. Everyone should have a journey - and everyone should also have a home, too. Go out into the world for adventure, come home for love.
Of all modern notions, the worst is this: that domesticity is dull. Inside the home, they say, is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and variety. But the truth is that the home is the only place of liberty, the only spot on earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim. The home is not the one tame place in a world of adventure; it is the one wild place in a world of rules and set tasks.
With the breakdown of discipline in the home and with every source of amusement and instruction pouring poison into daily life, it is not to be wondered that the minds of people are ready to receive anything but the truth and that they are ready to believe lies and ultimately the lie.
The broken home has become the number one social problem of America, and could ultimately lead to the destruction of our civilization . . . it does not make screaming headlines; but, like termites, it is eating away at the heart and core of the American structure.
The Lord Jesus Christ is preparing a home fit for all who live for Him, a place designed for the church triumphant. Let’s exemplify the work of His hands, for they are busy, on our behalf, building a city large enough to encompass His people of faith—an eternal home for the soul.
Although terrifying, the evil ghost will probably pose no real danger to you or your family. On the other hand, if you have a demonic infestation, your entire household is in very real danger. A demonic entity will not usually confront you or induce you to flee the home. Because, unlike the evil ghost, the demon does not actually want you to leave. On the contrary, it wants you to stick around so it can destroy your life and sully your soul from the inside.
I will missmy chest explodingyou coming home latenot turning on the lightalways waking me upI will missthe sudden burst of safetywhen you look at meor hold my handor say something like”let’s go home”I will missthe years I loston something or someone.The pieces didn’t fit, shaped wrongthe timing slightly off.I loved you like I always will.
i bring my kiasu friend to the airportleavings are never easy, not for longand though we both saw blur along the waymemories flooded present tensions.in the curry of his life no lemak remainedso now the predictable exit signalledthe end of his roundings, his bombings–he can bluff like hell, ma, he got style–and left me thinking about home, my kampong.
I wasn't safe. I wasn't permanent. My life was a fiction I had created, like an alien who comes to earth and tries to pass as human. The affections of my friends meant nothing to me, directed, as they were, toward a person who wasn't there. There was nobody home.
Foreign behavior? What the fuck are you talking about? Foreign behavior? Have you read Things Fall Apart? Ifemulu asked, wishing she had not told Ranyinudo about Dike. She was angrier with Ranyinudo than she had ever been, yet she knew that Ranyinudo meant well, and had said what many other Nigerians would say, which was why she had not told anyone else about Dike's suicide attempt since she came back.
Captain Harald Biscay rubbed his graying temples, staring deep in thought at the vast star field showing on the large navigation display on the bridge. It had been a pretty rough few days for him. Of all the things he’d seen in his travels through the universe, not many rated worthy of being remembered. Of the few examples of items Captain Biscay rated that highly, when he was a young man, his uncle would often play the bagpipes at strange hours of the night – shortly before being put in a ‘home’. That rated a mention.
It's just this: that there are places we all come from-deep-rooty-common places- that makes us who we are. And we disdain them or treat them lightly at our peril. We turn our backs on them at the risk of self-contempt. There is a sense in which we need to go home again-and can go home again. Not to recover home, no. But to sanctify memory.
Who can ever affirm, or deny that the houses which have sheltered us as children, or as adults, and our predecessors too, do not have embedded in their walls, one with the dust and cobwebs, one with the overlay of fresh wallpaper and paint, the imprint of what-has-been, the suffering, the joy?
The foundation for security and well being of a family is often built from a parent going extra miles to achieve it, doing mundane tasks to ensure it, standing up to injustice to protect it, and having the heart to listen and then express through embrace and action to each member of that sacred ohana how much they are deeply valued, unconditionally. And all the while, from birth, encouraging the other members to do the same. And often, from that foundation you have a home, well founded.
Just because you have stolen someone's heart, luckily owned and occupied as a home, doesn't give you the audacity to enforce hurtful policies.
I wrote home to say how lovely everything was, and I used flourishing words and phrases, as if I were living life in a greeting card - the kind that has a satin ribbon on it, and quilted hearts and roses, and is expected to be so precious to the person receiving it that the manufacturer has placed a leaf of plastic on the front to protect it.
At its core, the collection is built around a very wise line from a Beatles song: I want to hold your hand. I want to hold your hand with no further expectations. I want to hold your hand instead of telling you I understand when I don’t. I want to hold your hand although we don’t always get along. I want to hold your hand despite the calluses, scratches, and scars that get in the way. I want to hold your hand knowing I’ll have to let it go one day.
Plants are also integral to reweaving the connection between land and people. A place becomes a home when it sustains you, when it feeds you in body as well as spirit. To recreate a home, the plants must also return.
Dad says that everyone invented baklava.” It occurs to me now to wonder what that means. Aunt Aya rolls her eyes.“Your father? He is the worst of the worst. He thinks he cooks and eats Arabic food but these walnuts were not grown from Jordanian earth and this butter was not made from Jordanian lambs. He is eating the shadow of a memory. He cooks to remember but the more he eats, the more he forgets.
It has taken almost half my life away from Ireland for me to truly feel what home really is, and it is not what I was expecting. In the end it was not a place, or a past, or any sort of single, dazzling epiphany. It was all the little things. Cold butter spread thick on sweet wheaten bread or hot, subsiding potatoes; the scent of wet, black soil; a bushy spine of grass on a one-track road; wide iron gates leading to high beech corridors; the chalky smell of a cow's wet muzzle, and, most of all, in Seamus Heaney's words, the sound of rivers in the trees.
It has taken almost half my life away from Ireland for me to truly feel what home really is, and it is not what I was expecting. In the end it was not a place, or a past, or any sort of single, dazzling epiphany. It was all the little things. Cold butter spread thick on sweet wheaten bread or hot, subsiding potatoes; the scent of wet, black soil; a bushy spine of grass on a one-track road; wife iron gates leading to high beech corridors; the chalky smell of a cow's wet muzzle, and, most of all, in Seamus Heaney's words, the sound of rivers in the trees.
I gaze out, to the stars. I remember the first time I saw real stars, through the hatch window. They were beautiful then, but now, seeing them here, all around me, beautiful feels like an inadequate word. I see the stars as a part of the universe, and having spent my life behind walls, suddenly having none fills me with both awe and terror. Emotion courses through my veins, choking me. I feel so insignificant, a tiny speck surrounded by a million stars.A million suns.Centuries away is Sol. Circling around it is Sol-Earth, the planet Amy came from. And one of these other stars is the Centauri binary system, where the new planet spins, waiting for us.And here we are, in the middle, surrounded by a sea of stars.Any of them could hold a planet. Any of them could hold a home.But all of them are out of reach.
We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need — but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need — within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.
As many Chinas as there were, there were that many Charleses as well. Every immigrant is the person he might have been and the person he is, and his homeland is at once the place it would have been to him from the inside and the place it must be to him from the outside.
All of us are seeking a home, and I don't mean where we were born, or where we now live and have things, but where we can do the big things, the right things. Where we belong, where we fit, where we're loved."--Tennessee Williams, "Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog
But he was no longer in Tollygunge. He had stepped out of it as he had stepped so many mornings out of his dreams, its reality and its particular logic rendered meaningless in the light of day. The difference was so extreme that he could not accommodate the two places together in his mind. In this enormous new country, there seemed to be nowhere for the old to reside. There was nothing to link them; he was the sole link. Here life ceased to obstruct or assault him. Here was a place where humanity was not always pushing, rushing, running as if with a fire at its back
The gap that was created during those transatlantic voyages hundreds of years ago.That gap is the matrix of Saudade – The Longing, I think, that all Africans in the West have, that is at the root of the blues and jazz and soul and rap. If you listen you can hear it, elusive, fleeting, full of melancholy anger.
I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.
Out ahead of them, Arkady began something very like a marching song, chanting lines answered by the other ferals, their voices ringing out across the sky, each to each. Temeraire added his own to the chorus, and little Iskierka began to scrabble at his neck, demanding, "What are they saying? What does it mean?""We are flying home," Temeraire said, translating. "We are all flying home.
You can live for a long time inside the shell you were born in. But one day it'll become too small.""Then what?" I ask."Well, then you'll have to find a larger shell to live in."I consider this for a moment. "What if it's too small but you still want to live there?"She sighs. "Gracious, child, what a question. I suppose you'll either have to be brave and find a new home or you'll have to live inside a broken shell.
You may disagree. Personal history and national history do not always overlap, a point often overlooked in some of the broad strokes applied to the SG50 celebrations. But do consider your choices. In the age of Buzzfeed, we love lists. Make your own. No two lists will be the same, but collectively, they all say the same thing. They are all in search of a soul.
In a nice little house in Atro City there lived a man called Doktor Gleichstein. He was a kind of scientist, and he was very good at his job, which is why he always worked from home. He looked a little funny because he kept losing his eyebrows. Quantum Physics, is sort of like ordinary Physics, only you tend to spend a lot more time looking for the cat. He worked in the sitting room because he’d blown the garage up once already. Apparently a lot of things happened by accident in Quantum Physics.
Early one beautiful summer evening, when everyone else was drinking indoors, Tony and I walked down to the river. We lay on the grass under a tree and chatted. At one point, Tony said, "Look at the pattern of lace the leaves make against the sky." I looked at the canopy above us, and suddenly saw what he saw. My perspective completely shifted. I realized I didn't have his "eyes" -- though once he pointed it out, it became obvious. It made me think, "My God, I never look enough," and in the years since, I've tried very hard to look -- and look again.
Looking at the elementary schoolers in their colorful T-shirts from various day camps, Percy felt a twinge of sadness. He should be at Camp Half-Blood right now, settling into his cabin for the summer, teaching sword-fighting lessons in the arena, playing pranks on the other counselors. These kids had no idea just how crazy a summer camp could be.
A real love letter is made of insight, understanding, and compassion. Otherwise it's not a love letter. A true love letter can produce a transformation in the other person, and therefore in the world. But before it produces a transformation in the other person, it has to produce a transformation within us. Some letters may take the whole of our lifetime to write.
And then I laugh, because it's so ridiculous and so gorgeous and it's all I an do to not melt into a fit of giggles. So what if I'm ninety-three? So what if I'm ancient and cranky and my body's a wreck? If they're willing to accept me and my guilty conscience, why the hell shouldn't I run away with the circus? It's like Charlie told the cop. For this old man, this IS home.
This entire time I've been thinking about where my home was. At first it was California, then Wisconsin. But in truth, home isn't necessarily where you sleep at night. It's where you feel like yourself. Where you're most comfortable. Where you don't have to pretend, where you can just be you.
No settled family or community has ever called its home place an “environment.” None has ever called its feeling for its home place “biocentric” or “anthropocentric.” None has ever thought of its connection to its home place as “ecological,” deep or shallow. The concepts and insights of the ecologists are of great usefulness in our predicament, and we can hardly escape the need to speak of “ecology” and “ecosystems.” But the terms themselves are culturally sterile. They come from the juiceless, abstract intellectuality of the universities which was invented to disconnect, displace, and disembody the mind. The real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys; creeks, ridges, and mountains; towns and cities; lakes, woodlands, lanes roads, creatures, and people.And the real name of our connection to this everywhere different and differently named earth is “work.” We are connected by work even to the places where we don’t work, for all places are connected; it is clear by now that we cannot exempt one place from our ruin of another. The name of our proper connection to the earth is “good work,” for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials; it honors the place where it is done; it honors the art by which it is done; it honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing. Good work is always modestly scaled, for it cannot ignore either the nature of individual places or the differences between places, and it always involves a sort of religious humility, for not everything is known. Good work can be defined only in particularity, for it must be defined a little differently for every one of the places and every one of the workers on the earth.The name of our present society’s connection to the earth is “bad work” – work that is only generally and crudely defined, that enacts a dependence that is ill understood, that enacts no affection and gives no honor. Every one of us is to some extent guilty of this bad work. This guilt does not mean that we must indulge in a lot of breast-beating and confession; it means only that there is much good work to be done by every one of us and that we must begin to do it.
Love is always ready to deny itself, to give, sacrifice, just in the measure of its sincerity and intensity. Perfect love is perfect self-forgetfulness. Hence where there is love in a home, unselfishness is the law. Each forgets self and lives for others.But where there is selfishness it mars joy. One selfish soul will destroy the sweetness of life in any home. It is like an ugly bush in the midst of a garden of flowers. It was selfishness that destroyed the first home and blighted all the loveliness of Paradise; and it has been blighting lovely things in earth's home ever since. We need to guard against this spirit.
Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what’s called at home.
It's one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed's drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can't go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you--they're not, don't flatter yourself, they couldn't care less--but because once you're in orbit and you return to Reed's drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha's Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
For us, places we went were home. We didn't care if they were good or evil or neutral or what. We cared about the fact that for the first time, we didn't have to pretend to be something we weren't. We just got to be. That made all the difference in the world.
The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. Where tile catching the light (ting! Ting!)
Aedion touched her shoulder. "Welcome home, Aelin."A land of towering mountains-the Stagehorns-spread before them, with valleys and rivers and hills; a land of untamed, wild beauty.Terrasen.And the smell-of pine and snow.. How had she never realized that Rowan's scent was of Terrasen, of home? Rowan came close enough to graze her shoulder and murmured, "I feel as if I've been looking for this place my entire life.
How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. So far, so much between, you can never go home again. You can go home, it's good to go home, but you never really get all the way home again in your life. And what's it all for? All I tried to be, all I ever wanted and went away for, what's it all for?Just one way, you do get back home. You have a boy or a girl of your own and now and then you remember, and you know how they feel, and it's almost the same as if you were your own self again, as young as you could remember.And God knows he was lucky, so many ways, and God knows he was thankful. Everything was good and better than he could have hoped for, better than he ever deserved; only, whatever it was and however good it was, it wasn't what you once had been, and had lost, and could never have again, and once in a while, once in a long time, you remembered, and knew how far you were away, and it hit you hard enough, that little while it lasted, to break your heart.
There wasn't a single item of importance [in the newspaper]. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of imporant things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the centre of his compass at his own home.
The first thing I did when I got inside was turn on the kitchen light. Then I moved to the table, putting my dad's iPod on the speaker dock, and a Bob Dylan song came on, the notes familiar. I went into the living room, hitting the switch there, then down the hallway to my room, where I did the same. It was amazing what a little noise and brightness could do to a house and a life, how much the smallest bit of each could change everything. After all these years of just passing through, I was beginning to finally feel at home.
A true home is one of the most sacred of places. It is a sanctuary into which men flee from the world’s perils and alarms. It is a resting-place to which at close of day the weary retire to gather new strength for the battle and toils of tomorrow. It is the place where love learns its lessons, where life is schooled into discipline and strength, where character is molded.Few things we can do in this world are so well worth doing as the making of a beautiful and happy home. He who does this builds a sanctuary for God and opens a fountain of blessing for men.Far more than we know, do the strength and beauty of our lives depend upon the home in which we dwell. He who goes forth in the morning from a happy, loving, prayerful home, into the world’s strife, temptation, struggle, and duty, is strong--inspired for noble and victorious living. The children who are brought up in a true home go out trained and equipped for life’s battles and tasks, carrying in their hearts a secret of strength which will make them brave and loyal to God, and will keep them pure in the world’s severest temptations.
Corus lay on the southern bank of the Oloron River, towers glinting in the sun. The homes of wealthy men lined the river to the north; tanners, smiths, wainwrights, carpenters, and the poor clustered on the bank to the south. The city was a richly colored tapestry: the Great Gate on Kings-bridge, the maze of the Lower City, the marketplace, the tall houses in the Merchants' and the Gentry's quarters, the gardens of the Temple district, the palace. This last was the city's crown and southern border. Beyond it, the royal forest stretched for leagues. It was not as lovely as Berat nor as colorful as Udayapur, but it was Alanna's place.
[The kitchen] was also messy--delightfully so, thought Jane--and it didn't look as though lots of cooking went on there. There was a laptop computer on the counter with duck stickers on it, the spice cabinet was full of Ben's toy trucks, and Jane couldn't spot a cookbook anywhere. This is the kitchen of a Thinker, she decided, and promised herself that she'd never bother with cooking, either.
Mother seemed happiest when making and tending home, the sewing machine whistling and the Mixmaster whirling. Her deepest impulse was to nurture, to simply dwell; it had nothing to do with ambition and achievement in the world...How had I come to believe that my world of questing and writing was more valuable than her dwelling and domestic artistry?...I wanted to go out and do things--write books, speak out. I've been driven by that. I don't know how to rest in myself very well, how to be content staying put. But Mother knows how to BE at home--and really, to be in herself. It's actually very beautiful what she does...I think part of me just longs for the way Mother experiences home.
An alarming number of parents appear to have little confidence in their ability to "teach" their children. We should help parents understand the overriding importance of incidental teaching in the context of warm, consistent companionship. Such caring is usually the greatest teaching, especially if caring means sharing in the activites of the home.
VIDEO ARCHIVE-INTERVIEW 24768 . GOLD-EYEI like trees… grass… only birds in sky. People walking safe. FamilyNo Creatures. Sleep all night safe. Walk under sun in own place.Grow plants. Build.Be father with mother. Have Children. A place like Petar told me. Home.After Change goes back…I want home.
Home. It's such a simple word, one I never knew would come to mean as much to me as it has. It once was my dad's house, then my uncle's farm. Mostly it's meant wherever Charlie and I were together. Now, though, it's you. It's your letters, your words. They're the place I go to with my fears, where I find comfort, where I feel safe.
Home. When it rains, you can smell the leaves in the forest and the sand. It's all so small and mild, the landscape surrounding the lake, so manageable. The leaves and the sand are so close, it's as if you might, if you wanted, pull them on over your head. And the lake always laps at the shore so gently, licking the hand you dip into it like a young dog, and the water is soft and shallow.
What you do in your house is worth as much as if you did it up in heaven for our Lord God. We should accustom ourselves to think of our position and work as sacred and well-pleasing to God, not on account of the position and work, but on account of the word and faith from which the obedience and work flow.
what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto." (p123) Architecture of Happiness
Thomas Jefferson asked himself “In what country on earth would you rather live ” He first answered “Certainly in my own where are all my friends my relations and the earliest and sweetest affections and recollections of my life.” But he continued “which would be your second choice ” His answer “France.
They caught up with each other's news casually, leaving long, cosy gaps of silence in which to go to work on their muffins and coffees. Jerome - after two months of having to be witty and brilliant in a strange town among strangers - appreciated the gift of it. People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two lovers, but this too was great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. ~ on the comforts of home.
I've lived here ... my whole life. It's where I lost all my baby teeth. Where tiny hamster, gerbil, and bird skeletons lie in rotted-out cardboard coffins beneath the oak tree in our backyard. Also where, if some future archaeologist goes digging, they'll find the remains of a plush toy: a gray terrier named Toto I buried after the accident.
Because loners are born everywhere, we end up living everywhere. We do not, have not, tended to single ourselves out as special, elite, requiring rarefied environments. Too often we have done the opposite; lived where we lived because our jobs were there, or families, or because we'd heard the schools were good there, or that we would love a place with changing seasons. Then, no matter what, we put our noses to the grindstone. We take living there as a fait accompli, a fact. Too often we are miserable somewhere without realizing why. We blame ourselves for not buckling down, settling in, fitting in. The problem is the place, but too often we do not see this, we will not allow ourselves to see this. It's the same old thing: This is a friendly town, so what's your problem?...To the non-loner, or the self-reproaching loner, the fact of being a loner is not comparable to those other determinants. It is not a matter of life and death, we tell ourselves. It its not a matter of breathing or of execution by stoning. But home is the crucible of living...So how can living not be a matter of life and death?
All white people are born with a singular mission in life in order to pass from regular whitehood into ultra-whitehood. Just as Muslims have to visit Mecca, all white people must eventually renovate a house before they can be complete.
[They] believed that the worst way to die, was far from home. That one’s soul traveled the earth, lost forever. But this place was as much her home as [California]. She had lived out some of the most important parts of her life here – and if that didn’t qualify a place as home, what did?
I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.
Thomas Wolfe warned in the title of America’s great novel that ‘You Can’t Go Home Again.’ I enjoyed the book but I never agreed with the title. I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.Home is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant. Parents, siblings, and neighbors, are mysterious apparitions, who come, go, and do strange unfathomable things in and around the child, the region’s only enfranchised citizen.[…]We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.
I sat on a toilet watching the water run thinking what an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile effort to recapture the comforts you wouldn’t have lost if you hadn’t left home in the first place.
He thinks money spent on a home is money wasted. He's lived too much in hotels. Never the best hotels, of course. Second-rate hotels. He doesn't understand a home. He doesn't feel at home in it. And yet, he wants a home. He's even proud of having this shabby place. He loves it here.
Bellusdeo laughed. It was, for a moment, the only sound in the quiet of the fief’s night, and it was warmer and deeper than the lingering night chill. When her laughter faded, she glanced at Kaylin. “I was not like this before. I thought that the Shadows had not touched me.” She lowered her head a moment.Kaylin understood this, as well. “It seems so unfair,” she finally said.“Life is unfair. Which part of it pains you?”“We suffer, and it breaks something. When we win free—by gaining our name, by crossing a bloody bridge—we still live in a cage of scars. If life were fair, we would never have suffered what we suffered at all; having suffered it and survived, we’re still reacting to things that don’t exist anymore.”“But they did.”“Yes. I hate that they still define me.” Voice lower, she said to Bellusdeo, “I want that to change. I don’t know how to change it. But I’m willing to spend the rest of my life trying.” Shaking her head, she forced herself to smile; it was surprisingly easy. There was something about Bellusdeo that she liked. “Home is a strange thing.”“What do you mean?”“We lose it, and we think it’s gone forever. That’s how I felt the first time I lost mine. It took me years to understand that I could find—and make—another. I couldn’t do it on my own, though; I don’t think—for me—home exists in isolation.
At forty-three, I bought my first house. I’d wanted one like crazy. A house meant family, a happy childhood for my litttle girl and for the little girl self inside me. . . . I was soon overwhelmed by the upkeep and overcome by the yardwork. . . . In the bright light of closing, it was obvious: it was never a house I wanted; it was what a house symbolized to me. (254)
If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.
You can never really escape. It goes with you, wherever you go. Somehow, the prairie dust gets in your blood, and it flows through your veins until it becomes a part of you. The vast stretches of empty fields, the flat horizons of treeless plains. The simplicity of the people—good, earnest people. The way they talk and the way they live. The lack of occurrence, lack of attention, lack of everything. All that—it’s etched into your soul and it colors the way you see everything and it becomes a part of you. Eventually, Ms. Harper, when you leave, everything you experience outside of Kansas will be measured against all you know here. And none of it will make any sense.
This is what happened when one left one's home - pieces of oneself scattered all over the world, no one place ever completely satisfied, always a nostalgia for the place left behind. Pieces of her in Vietnam, some in this place of bone. She brought the letter to her nose. The smell of Vietnam: a mix of jungle and wetness and spices and rot. A smell she hadn't realized she missed.
Helen's Saigon had always been about selling - chickens, information, or lovely young women, it didn't matter. It had once been called the Pearl of the Orient, but by people who had not been there in a very long time. Saigon had never been Paris, but now it was a garrison town, unlovely, a stinking refugee shantyville filled with the angry, the betrayed, the dispossessed, but she had made it her home, and she couldn't bear that soon she would have to leave.
Does your home make you happy? This place, this sanctuary, that we call home should be a place that makes us feel joyful, safe, and at peace. Let your home be a place of beauty. Let it be that your home never makes you feel trapped, stressed, or drained. Having a place of sanctuary is very important for the mental well-being. No matter what happens in the outside world there needs to always be a place for you to balance out and recharge. Let your home be a sanctuary that gives you peace.
Don’t sell based on inventory. Inventory based on who you want to sell.A lot of people sell homes. They all have structure. Location, size, style, function, benefit, community, who stays (and leaves)...totally different. You can sell or do anything at a premium. It may be a home, but the type of clientele you work with is a choice. Don’t sell based on inventory. Inventory based on who you want to sell.Go to work.
It all comes together inside her, and she can’t begin to explain. “It’s just a pattern,” she says, feeling bad because it’s a lie. She’s lying to Miss Justineau, who she loves more than anyone in the world. And of course the other part of the feeling, that’s even harder to say, is that they’re each other’s home now. They have to be.
You shall not go down good twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You CAN go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
Anywhere you find peace of mind is your home!
But years and miles away from home could never attenuate the city's hold on my identity, and the more I explored places and people far from Hampton, the more my status as one of its daughters came to mean to me.
Homes, Gamache knew, were a self portrait. A person's choice of color, furnishing, pictures, every touch revealed the individual. God, or the devil, was in the details. And so was the human. Was it dirty, messy, obsessively clean? Were the decorations chosen to impress, or were they a hodgepodge of personal history? Was the space cluttered or clear? He felt a thrill every time he entered a home during an investigation.
A man goes away from his home and it is in him to do it. He lies in strange beds in the dark, and the wind is different in the trees. He walks in the street and there are the faces in front of his eyes, but there are no names for the faces. the voices he hears are not the voices he carried away in his ears a long time back when he went away. The voices he hears are loud. they are so loud he does not hear for a long time at a stretch those voices he carried away in his ears. but there comes a minute when it is quiet and he can hear those voices he carried away in his ears a long time back. He can make out what they say, and they say: Come back. They say: Come back, boy. So he comes back.
Sabotage isolated them from their home, thwarting any hope of outside help. Frantic, unreliable sightings of frightening things – horrible things - led to chaos. The crew, terrified, opted to die fighting and went hunting for their attacker. Kaine’s only regret was that they found it. It killed them all.Systematically.
It was a fairly large house, larger than all our previous dwellings. There were two pinkwashed, picture- windowed, orange gable-roofed storeys, encompassing eight rooms, and an adjoining, presently shuttered garage. A friendly, unsymmetrical house, with pink bougainvillea hanging over the iron-lace decorated, semi-circular front porch and ivy climbing from the walls to the uneven gables.
So how long do I have before—what were their names? Carl and Rosa? Yeah, that’s them. How long do I have before they come back?”“I don’t know. Maybe...maybe an hour or so?” My hands felt incredibly small in his.That lopsided grin was back. “I doubt they’d be happy to find me here.”“Why?”His brows rose. “Maybe I’m wrong. They used to coming home to find some strange guy sitting on their couch?”I rolled my eyes.“That’s it, isn’t it?” Rider tugged on my hands, and I rose, letting him pull me down to the couch beside him. He leaned back, sliding one arm around my shoulders and tucking me against his side. “Just par for the course with you, huh?”I didn’t know what to do with my hands since he’d let go of them, so I folded them in my lap. “I’ve never had a...guy here.”Rider stiffened and then he twisted his neck so he was looking at me.Did I seriously admit that out loud? Squeezing my eyes shut, I sighed. “I’m just...going to shut up now.”He chuckled. “Don’t do that. I like listening to you talk.
I think that home shouldn't be a place you need to leave if you want to experience something in consonance with your innermost being. Home should be a place of experimentation and discovery, a place of peace and quiet where the most natural in each individual can be developed in fine-tuning to the desires and searches of others.
I mean . . . I don't know. I don't know what I want to do, or who I want to be, or where I want to live. I don't know. I like reading about adventure, sure, but I also like doing it from the safety of home. But what is home, besides a quilt-covered bed? Where is it?
Where are you going?” Wesley asked in a semi-sleepy voice.“Home.” I pulled on my jeans. “I’ve gotta take a shower and get ready for school.”He pushed himself up on one elbow to look at me. His hair was a mess, brown curls falling into his eyes and sticking up in the back. “You can shower here,” he offered. “I might even join you if you’re lucky.
You know what I remember most vividly from that hospital? There were creases in the pillowcase. "I was in pain when they brought me in. They'd bandaged me up before transporting me, but they hand't had anything to deaden that kind of pain. So I wasn't clear in my head. I don't remember who was holding the stretcher, anything like that. "But when they lifted me up, and I looked at the cot I'd be transferred to, even as they tipped me onto it, I noticed the creases in the pillowcase, and it was everything I could do not to cry. You get used to things being dusty and gritty and oily, you really do, but then, when there's something clean, something that's been folded carefully, and unfolded carefully and it's there for your head, it's like your heart, it's like I don't know, I can't describe it.
But can't you even imagine what it must feel like to have a true home? I don't mean heaven. I mean a real earthly home. Not some fortress you bought and built up and have to keep everybody locked in or out. A real home. Not some place you went to and invaded and slaughtered people to get. Not some place you claimed, snatched because you got the guns. Not some place you stole from the people living there, but your own home, where if you go back past your great-great-grandparents, past theirs, and theirs, past the whole of Western history, past the beginning of organized knowledge, past pyramids and poison bows, on back to when rain was new, before plants forgot they could sing and birds thought they were fish, back when God said Good! Good!-- there, right there where you know your own people were born and lived and died. Imagine that, Pat. That place. Who was God talking to if not to my people living in my home?""You preaching, Reverend.""No, I'm talking to you, Pat. I'm talking to you.
The home is the center of life. It is a refuge from the grind of work, the pressure of school, and the menace of the streets. We say that at home, we can “be ourselves.” Everywhere else, we are someone else. At home, we remove our masks. The home is the wellspring of personhood. It is where our identity takes root and blossoms, where as children, we imagine, play, and question, and as adolescents, we retreat and try. As we grow older, we hope to settle into a place to raise a family or pursue work. When we try to understand ourselves, we often begin by considering the kind of home in which we were raised.
Love is when two (or more) hearts build a safe emotional, mental, and spiritual home that will stand strong no matter how much anyone changes on the inside or the outside. It demands only one things and expects only one thing: that each person be his or her own true self.
If there's a feeling to home, it's this. A place where there are no secrets, where nothing stays buried; not the past and not yourself. Where you can be all the versions of you, see it all reflected back at you as you walk the same stairs, the same halls, the same rooms. Feel the ghost of your mother as you sit at the kitchen table, hear the words of your father circling round and round after dinner, and your brother stopping by, wishing you'd be a little better, a little stronger.... It's four walls echoing back everything you've ever been and everything you've ever done, and it's the people who stay despite it all. Through it all. For it all.
As humans, we roam the entire world. We even venture beyond it not space. The whole planet is ours, but the whole planet is not our home. Instead, home is the ground we measure with our own two feet. And home is the place that measures us. Home is the place that names us and the place we, in turn, name. It feeds us, body and soul, and if we are living well, we feed it too. Home is the place we cultivate with our love.
Everything starts from home. If the father isn’t there, then the friends are going to step up to influence the young boy astray. This is where the problems come in, because in my community the majority of the children do not have any fathers in the home. I can only speak for my community. This is why with the young guys who do hang around me, I always do my best to encourage them. I have already lived the negative side on the streets, so I prefer to encourage them on the positive side - to encourage them to get a job, save their money and to do something for their families.Franco ‘Co’ Bethel, former gang leader and right hand man to Scrooge.
These steel monstrosities screamed night and day, blotted out the starlit skies and Northern Lights with flashing red strobes, slaughtered thousands of bats and entire flocks of birds banished tourism and wildlife, made people sick and drove them from their now-valueless homes.
It doesn’t take a farm to invoke the iron taste of leaving in your mouth. Anyone who loves a small plot of ground — a city garden, a vacant lot with some guerilla beds, a balcony of pots — understands the almost physical hurt of parting from it, even for a minor stint. I hurt every day I wake up in our city bed, wondering how the light will be changing over the front field or across the pond, whether the moose will be in the willow by the cabin again, if the wren has fledged her young ones yet and we’ll return to find the box untended. I can feel where the farm is at any point in my day, not out of some arcane sixth sense developed from years of summer nights out there with the coyotes under the stars, but because of the bond between that earth and this body. Some grounds we choose; some are our instinctive homes.
Those who die young, they are cheated,” she said. “Not cheated out of life, because life is a penance, but the young, they’re cheated because they don’t know it’s coming. They don’t have time to move closer, to return home. When you know you’re going to die, you try to be near the bones of your own people. You don’t even think you have bones when you’re young, even when you break them, you don’t believe you have them. But when you’re old, they start reminding you they’re there. They start turning to dust on you, even as you’re walking here and there, going from place to place. And this is when you crave to be near the bones of your own people. My children never felt this. They had to look death in the face, even before they knew what it was. Just like you did, no?
GreenHollyWood, I think that you asked me why I don't get out?- I'm kinda in hateful state, I hate to watch the fucking liars to lie in front of my face and backward to put the knife in my back. Why I stay home?- It's awesome place, I feel safe and out of the ignorance there is always somebody to harass for to get attention.
Sometimes I can’t tell if you hate this place or love it.”“I love its potential. I hate its past. And I don’t like what it is.” She hugs her knees close to her chest. “The way you feel about the place you grew up in is a lot like how you feel about your family.”“How’s that?”She thinks about it for a long time. “Like isn’t the same thing as love.
It is ridiculous to lay down to people where a thing should stand, design everything for them from the lavatory pan to the ashtray. On the contrary, I like people to move their furniture so that it suits them (not me!), and it's quite natural (and I approve) when they bring the old pictures and mementos they have come to love into a new interior, irrespective of whether they are good taste or bad.
Doors opened everywhere. Maybe one day, the children of this world who had gone to that world to save themselves would see a door that didn't fit right with the walls around it, something with a doorknob made of a moon, or a knocker that winked. Maybe they could still go home,
How people feel when they are returning home from an absence, long or short, I did not know: I had never experienced the sensation. I had known what it was to come back to Gateshead when a child after a long walk, to be scolded for looking cold or gloomy; and later, what it was to come back from church to Lowood, to long for a plenteous meal and a good fire, and to be unable to get either. Neither of these returnings was very pleasant or desirable: no magnet drew me to a given point, increasing in its strength of attraction the nearer I came. The return to Thornfield was yet to be tried.
I expected to be happy, but let me tell you something. Anticipating happiness and being happy are two entirely different things. I told myself that all I wanted to do was go to the mall. I wanted to look at the pretty girls, ogle the Victoria's Secret billboards, and hit on girls at the Sam Goody record store. I wanted to sit in the food court and gorge on junk food. I wanted to go to Bath and Body Works, stand in the middle of the store, and breathe. I wanted to stand there with my eyes closed and just smell, man. I wanted to lose myself in the total capitalism and consumerism of it all, the pure greediness, the pure indulgence, the pure American-ness of it all. I never made it that far. I didn't even make it out of the airport in Baltimore with all its Cinnabons, Starbucks, Brooks Brothers, and Brookstones before realizing that after where we'd been, after what we'd seen, home would never be home again.
But that's not quite right either.I miss Paris, but it's not home. It's more like... I miss this. This warmth over the telephone. Is it possible for home to be a person and not a place? Bridgette used to be home to me. Maybe St. Clair is my new home.I mull this over as our voices grow tired and we stop talking. We just keep each other company. My breath. His breath. My breath. His breath.I could never tell him, but it's true.This is home. The two of us.
Wasn't that the gift of a home? You looked at it the same way, but then when you needed it to, it showed you all over again the many ways you'd been during the time you had been living there. The many ways it brought you back to yourself. The many ways it still brought you back to yourself.
An Indian child is brought up in England, and he will speak both English and Hindi very well. English in school and Hindi at home. But here it’s English both in schools and at home. Why can’t you speak Swahili with your child at home? If this continues we will turn into an English speaking country.
If your spirit is persistently harmless or if it has shown itself to you, in a non-threatening way, then you most definitely have a ghost. The ghost can be frightening, by its very nature. But the ghost will never intentionally frighten you. They will be there for three reasons: 1. They used to live there and are attached to the location 2. They are trying to communicate something to the living or 3. They are protective of somebody who lives in the house and so they are “standing guard” so to speak, over the loved one.
Don't know. Don't care. I'm hopping on a bus and going until I can't go any farther. Until I find a place that feels like home.'He's quiet for a long time. 'How will you know what home feels like?'It hangs in the air between us, as frozen as our breaths. I don't have an answer.
Every creature on earth returns to home. It is ironic that we have made wildlife refuges for ibis, pelican, egret, wolf, crane, deer, mouse, moose, and bear, but not for ourselves in the places we live day after day. We understand that the loss of habitat is the most disastrous event that can occur to a free creauture. We fervently point out how other creatures' natural territories have become surrounded by cities, ranches, highways, noise, and other dissonance, as though we are not affected also. We know that for creatures to live on, they must at least from time to time have a home place, a place where they feel both protected and free
From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes 'responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.' It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, 'the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home?
...and in those hours the world would feel very large, and the lake very empty, and the night very black, and he would wish he were back in Wyoming, waiting at the end of the road for Hemming, where the only path he had to navigate was the one back to his parent's house, where the porch light washed the night with honey.
My head cleared the water, and a strong arm wrapped around my middle as my lungs automatically sucked in air. I started coughing immediately, water sputtering out of my mouth. I blinked against my blurred vision as commotion erupted around me. “Help me, man,” a voice said. It was desperate and
The butterflies are working their way up from my stomach into my head, making me feel dizzy, and I try to calm myself by imagining the ocean outside, its ragged breathing, the seagulls turning pinwheels in the sky.It will be over soon, I tell myself. It will be over soon and then you’ll go home, and you’ll never have to think about the evaluation again.
Anyway, in those years, I was happy, as to one extent or another I have always been happy. The forest was not a wilderness to me, but served instead as my private garden, comforting in spite of its vastness, and endlessly mysterious.The more familiar a place becomes, the more mysterious it becomes, as well, if you are alert to the truth of things. I have found this to be the case all of my life.
Where's your home, then?" asked the Snork Maiden."Nowhere" said Snufkin a little sadly, "or everywhere. It depends on how you look at it.""Haven't you got a mother?" asked Moomintroll, looking very sorry for him."I don't know," said Snufkin. "They tell me I was found in a basket.""Like Moses," said Sniff."I like the story about Moses," said the Snork. "But I think his mother could have found a better way of saving him, don't you? The crocodiles might have eaten him up.""They nearly ate us up," said Sniff.
Although both home and mental illness are complex, modern ideas, we have fallen into the habit of using phrases such as "housing the homeless" and "treating the mentally ill" as if we knew what counts as housing a homeless person or what it means to treat mental illness. But we do not. We have deceived ourselves that having a home and being mentally healthy are our natural conditions, and that we become homeless or mentally ill as a result of "losing" our homes or our minds. The opposite is the case. We are born without a home and without reason, and have to exert ourselves and are fortunate if we succeed in building a secure home and a sound mind.
Even heaven would become hell if you were alone in it, or away from a loved one. And even if you were with your loved one, but in hell, eventually you would cry to have you and your loved one together in heaven. So to create your own heaven on earth, make sure you and your loved one are in a place you both love, because what could be heaven for one, could be hell for the other.
The house, and all the objects in it, crackled with static electricity; undertows washed through it, the air was heavy with things that were known but not spoken. Like a hollow log, a drum, a church, it was amplified, so that conversations whispered in it sixty years ago can be half-heard today.
There were three people in my home and I was the only one showing Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity and reactivity to the radio frequency transmitting utility meters. For these reasons I did not shield my home and took the route of adapting my body to the toxic electromagnetic environment.
He tensed up at the thought of going back to work. Avoid stressful thoughts, he reminded himself. There was no need to rush his vacation thinking about such foul things as coming back home or going back to work. The vacation had only just begun and it was going to be a good one.
New becomes stale and old becomes fresh. The impractical, ageing estate long ago left behind to Singapore's pioneers and their homemade tofu stalls takes on a certain irreverence and originality; an anarchic streak even. It goes against the architectural grain. It stands out in a crowd, a rebel with curves. The reclusive behaviour only adds to the appeal. So the old place becomes "hip".
When I realized that my home was completely filled with a biologically toxic radio wave field, I decided that the best route forward was to milk the home for all of the biological research that I could possibly produce from it!
Children, language, lands: almost everything was stripped away, stolen when you weren’t looking because you were trying to stay alive. In the face of such loss, one thing our people could not surrender was the meaning of land. In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold. These are the meanings people took with them when they were forced from their ancient homelands to new places.
Last night I walked for hours. It was as if I wanted to get lost down some unknown street. To get absolutely and happily lost. But there are moments when we can’t, when we don’t know how to lose our way. Even if we always go in the wrong direction. Even if we lose all our points of reference. Even if it begins to grow late and we feel the weight of morning as we advance. There are times when no matter how we try to find out what we don’t know, we can’t lose our way. And perhaps we long for the time when we could be lost. The time when all the streets were new.
I was only going to stay six months. I stayed three years, and I never stopped thinking about leaving. But when I left, I left my entire life behind. I have to explain to you why I no longer live in New York, but first I have to explain to myself why I stayed so long.
I love what Jacksonville taught me and where it led me. The good, the bad and the indifferent all helped shape me. I may not live there anymore but it lives inside me. It is and will always be my foundation.
Turning on the shower, he thought of the wildly fancy bathroom at Charlotte's house. It was funny to think of, but the bathrooms he liked weren't fancy; this one, and the one at Seymour's, and the one at Harry's. They weren't fancy, but they were home. He got in the shower. The one squirt that always went haywire hit him right in the eye. He laughed up into the warm water running over his ears.
This is so much like the old days. And, again, I have mixed feelings. In some ways it's good and comfortable to be fitting straight back in like I've never been away, but, on the other hand, I'm getting this constrictive feeling as well. It's the same places - like the bars and pubs on Friday night - the same people, the same conversations, the same arguments and the same attitudes. Five years away and not much seems to have changed. I can't decide if this is good or bad.
When I stepped onto the bridge over the Iowa River and stood looking out across the water, I knew I was home. I was wrong about that, as it turns out. And I know now that my certainty was based on a series of troubling misconceptions, but it would be years before I would lose the comfort that certainty gave me.
I forgot how good it feels to be rooted. And to be rooted is not the same thing at all as being tied down. To be rooted is to say, here I am nourished and here will I grow, for I have found a place where every sunrise shows me how to be more than what I was yesterday, and I need not wander to feel the wonder of my blessing. And when you are rooted, defending that space ceases to be an obligation or a duty and becomes more of a desire.
Instead of fighting it, I close my eyes and let myself go. I feel the muscles of his shoulder beneath my hand. The frame his arms create is strong, secure, but I want those arms tighter around me. Much tighter around me. Much tighter, much closer.I want there to be no space at all between us.I. Want. Him. So. Badly.I want to kiss him, laugh with him, cry with him, share every freaking moment of my life with him because no matter how many awful things he's done in the past, I can't shake the undeniable feeling that when his arms are around me, I'm home.
For so long, maybe all my life, I thought only a house could make you whole. I thought I was nothing without an interesting address. I thought I was only as good as my color scheme, my drawer pulls, my floors....it's the knowledge that a house can be as fragile as life itself. You'd think it would be stronger, since it can stand in one spot for centuries while generations of humans run through its rooms, grow up, move out, and eventually die. But a house is an inherently limited entity. It can't do everything, or even most things. It cannot give you a personality. It cannot bring you love. It cannot cure loneliness. It can provide comfort, safety, a sense of pride--that much I know.
I wonder if the real measure of "home" is the degree to which you can leave it alone. Maybe appreciating a house means knowing when to stop decorating. Maybe you've never really lived there until you've thrown its broken pieces in the garbage. Maybe learning how to be out in the big world isn't the epic journey everyone thinks it is. Maybe that's actually the easy part. The hard part is what's right in front of you. The hard part is learning how to hold the title to your very existence, to own not only property, but also your life. The hard part is learning not just how to be but mastering the nearly impossible art of how to be at home.
For so long, maybe all my life, I thought only a house could make you whole. I thought I was nothing without an interesting address. I thought I was only as good as my color scheme, my drawer pulls, my floors....it's the knowledge that a house can be as fragile as life itself. You'd think it would be stronger, since it can stand in one spot for centuries while generations of humans run through tis rooms, grow up, move out, and eventually die. But a house is an inherently limited entity. It can't do everything, or even most things. I t cannot give you a personality. It cannot bring you love. It cannot cure loneliness. It can provide comfort, safety, a sense of pride--that much I know.
Did you see Grace is back with us?"Megan did see me. She saw me jump off a cliff and crawl under an Iranian fence. Megan has seen plenty. And I can't help but hold my breath, waiting on her answer."Hi," Megan says, turning to me. "Welcome home."Home. The word hits me. I've spent all my life thinking that I didn't have one, but now that I'm back I can't deny that I've spent more my life on Embassy Row than in any other place-that maybe it just wasn't my mother's childhood home. In a way, it's mine, too.
The ancients said that for persons who cultivated body and mind, and who are virtuous and honorable, death is an experience of liberation, a long-awaited rest from a lifetime of labors. Death helps the unscrupulous person to put an end to the misery of desire. Death, then, for everyone is a kind of homecoming. That is why the ancient sages speak of a dying person as a person who is 'going home.
Life can surprise you. You want something with every ounce of blood that flows in your veins, and then one day it's yours. Right there before you. Everything. You break out in a cold sweat with the undeniable realization that what you really want is home. Sometimes finding home is a long time coming. A long journey.
Like most people, when I look back, the family house is held in time, or rather it is now outside of time, because it exists so clearly and it does not change, and it can only be entered through a door in the mind. I like it that pre-industrial societies, and religious cultures still, now, distinguish between two kinds of time – linear time, that is also cyclical because history repeats itself, even as it seems to progress, and real time, which is not subject to the clock or the calendar, and is where the soul used to live. This real time is reversible and redeemable. It is why, in religious rites of all kinds, something that happened once is re-enacted – Passover, Christmas, Easter, or, in the pagan record, Midsummer and the dying of the god. As we participate in the ritual, we step outside of linear time and enter real time. Time is only truly locked when we live in a mechanised world. Then we turn into clock-watchers and time-servers. Like the rest of life, time becomes uniform and standardised. When I left home at sixteen I bought a small rug. It was my roll-up world. Whatever room, whatever temporary place I had, I unrolled the rug. It was a map of myself. Invisible to others, but held in the rug, were all the places I had stayed – for a few weeks, for a few months. On the first night anywhere new I liked to lie in bed and look at the rug to remind myself that I had what I needed even though what I had was so little. Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you. Why did I leave home when I was sixteen? It was one of those important choices that will change the rest of your life. When I look back it feels like I was at the borders of common sense, and the sensible thing to do would have been to keep quiet, keep going, learn to lie better and leave later. I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it. And here is the shock – when you risk it, when you do the right thing, when you arrive at the borders of common sense and cross into unknown territory, leaving behind you all the familiar smells and lights, then you do not experience great joy and huge energy. You are unhappy. Things get worse. It is a time of mourning. Loss. Fear. We bullet ourselves through with questions. And then we feel shot and wounded. And then all the cowards come out and say, ‘See, I told you so.’ In fact, they told you nothing.
Once you open your home to nursing, you essentially become the employer of a small staff, even if you aren’t signing the paychecks. As in any workplace, the staff needs to know the rules and expectations, and it is your job to set them and communicate them well. This is your new job; you’ve been promoted to Home Care CEO.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, the longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home.
But even though our old home had physically seen better days, I knew in that moment that we had taken the soul of that house with us to our new home. And as I branched out and left our small town, I'd taken all the best bits of home life - the essence of its soul - with me wherever I went. It's the soul that matters most, after all. And even though over the years I've lived in everything from a cramped dorm room at school to a grand apartment in Paris and finally to our family town home in Santa Monica, I have taken the soul of home with me, wherever I am.
Driving to see my childhood home was very significant for me. It taught me the importance of home, especially to children. Your home is more than just a shelter. It is more than just a place to showcase your design skills. It is more than just a means to an end (especially if you would rather live somewhere else). It is the most importance place of your life. It provides you solace and refuge from the harsh world. It provides tangible comforts, like your cozy sofa and warm bed. But it also provides other comforts in the energy it gives off. You will have so many memories in this home. There will be many firsts here, and if you have children, they will remember even the smallest details about your home - especially all of its off-beat character.
I took [Kate's] hand in mine, and felt her fingers squeeze back. And I thought: home. It took me completely by surprise. But I suppose that once you bid farewell to your first home, you're always looking for another—that place where you can feel happy and strong and at your best. For three years I'd called the Aurora home. But now that I lived in Paris, it was not the city itself that was home. It was Kate.
I come to call you Home.Those who resonate with my words and follow them internally, will find that place and know It's completeness, its joy and fullness.I have come to call you away from suffering, from fear and from a life of sorrow and into your own, divine Being.I did not come here to give you decorative stories, to excite your imagination, or sign you up for some long program but to show you how available Truth is, and to remind you that you are never separate from It.No person on this planet is apart from the Truth in the Heart and yet the world is so vast and varied in expression.The greatest good and greatest evil is here.In this forest of duality and complexity you must find your way Home.You must win your Self back. Wisdom and trust will be your compass.Many voices came to call us but we are here today because we are freshly called by the voice of God, Love, Truth.Do not come half way home, but fully home.I know the voice that called you is true and Truth and that where you are being called to is also Real.It is inside your own Heart.It is what gives me the strength to be here.I love to see the beings being set free from the hypnosis of conditioning; from fears, false projection and the grip of ego.And I know that to be liberated is not difficult.It requires only openness and the sincere desire to be free.I don't need to hear anything about your past.Your stories are of no interest to me.That is not how I know you.I know you only through your Heart.That is my true connection with you -the living power of God.It is That which I respond to in youand it is only This that I know.I can only keep reminding you of It by pointing you again and again to the obvious in yourself.Now you must respond to my pointing.This will complete this yoga of seeing.Find and be one with That which is imperishable.Be merged in the Absolute.Don't go to sleep.
The Tejo runs down from SpainAnd the Tejo goes into the sea in Portugal.Everybody knows that.But not many people know the river of my villageAnd where it comes fromAnd where it’s going.And so, because it belongs to less people,The river of my village is freer and greater.
If more people understood how nice it is to have a sense of home that extends past our locked doors, past our neighbors' padlocks, to the local food co-op and library, the sidewalks busted up by old trees - if we all held home with longer arms - we'd live in a very different place...We wouldn't feel so alone, no matter the size of our houses or our bank accounts, no matter whether we had good health or congestive heart failure. We would begin to see that each moment presents an opportunity to relax, to notice that the wind has shifted and a storm is coming, or that our friend's toddler has decided to wear dinner instead of eating it. We would see that each minute counts for something timeless and, if we want, we all can find our way inside these big, tiny, moments.
My friends stood on the ground two feet below me, and miles away from understanding why I would want to sleep on a trailer platform... I couldn't possibly begin to explain what was only beginning to bud inside me: I wanted a home. I wanted to be at home, in the world and in my body (a feeling I had been missing since I'd woken up in the hospital) and somehow, in some as yet undefined way, I knew that windows in the great room and a skylight over my bed were going to help with that.
Every city, every town, hides beneath a certain amount of glamour that- either intentionally or not- can misdirect the eye or hide something worth finding. Learning to see through those glamours is part of the process of calling any place home.
I can hear birds singing but they don't sound at all like the birds I knew. These are mocking and possessed. I imagine they have deformed bodies with glowing eyes, leading the wagon to my own personal damnation. All my wishes and all my draining prayers haven't brought me home. They are bringing me to the one place I sought to be and the one place I wanted to far from.
Home...Is there really any place like it? A warm place filled with comfortable things. The smells and sounds of a home can ease the heaviest of hearts. A place where everything we cherish is nestled within its walls and greets us with familiar smiles as we walk through its' doors. When we wander away, if we're lucky enough, its arms await to embrace us once more.
You do not see any improvements you would make?"Miss Harding's smile turned mischievous. "Not at present. But I should have to see the inside. That is where ladies really excel, you know, in curtains and cushions and such.""Indeed," David murmured, remembering how Maude had filled the London house with bolts and piles of fabrics and wallpapers and pillows the instant they arrived. Everything in the very latest style. And then he thought of Emma's cosy sitting room, all books and family portraits and dog beds.
The Pacific is my home ocean; I knew it first, grew up on its shore, collected marine animals along the coast. I know its moods, its color, its nature. It was very far inland that I caught the first smell of the Pacific. When one has been long at sea, the smell of land reaches far out to greet one. And the same it true when one has been long inland.
You don’t really have idea about any of that olden-days stuff, do you?” He’s sure he can feel her smiling against his shoulder. “Busted,” she says. “Ah, it’s some nice talk, though, Sol. You make it all sound real nice.” “That’s the beauty of it. Just dreaming thoughts on once-was things. Animals and helping people and one place you could always call hom
I should have asked why any room in the house was better than home to me when she entered it, and barren as a desert when she went out again—why I always noticed and remembered the little changes in her dress that I had noticed and remembered in no other woman’s before—why I saw her, heard her, and touched her (when we shook hands at night and morning) as I had never seen, heard, and touched any other woman in my life?
He sat down on a grassy bank and looked at the city that surrounded him, and thought, one day he would have to go home. And one day he would have to make a home to go back to. He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.
He had been haunted his whole life by a mildcase of claustrophobia—the vestige of a childhood incident he had never quite overcome.Langdon’s aversion to closed spaces was by no means debilitating, but it had always frustrated him.It manifested itself in subtle ways. He avoided enclosed sports like racquetball or squash, and he hadgladly paid a small fortune for his airy, high-ceilinged Victorian home even though economical facultyhousing was readily available. Langdon had often suspected his attraction to the art world as a youngboy sprang from his love of museums’ wide open spaces.
Biju stepped out of the airport into the Calcutta night, warm, mammalian. His feet sank into dust winnowed to softness at his feet, ad he felt an unbearable feeling, sad and tender, old and sweet like the memory of falling asleep, a baby on his mother's lap. Thousands of people were out though it was almost eleven. He saw a pair of elegant bearded goats in a rickshaw, riding to slaughter. A conference of old men with elegant goat faces, smoking bidis. A mosque and minarets lit magic green in the night with a group of women rushing by in burkas, bangles clinking under the black and a big psychedelic mess of colour from a sweet shop. Rotis flew through the air as in a juggling act, polka-dotting the sky high over a restaurant that bore the slogan "Good food makes good mood". Biju stood there in that dusty tepid soft sari night. Sweet drabness of home - he felt everything shifting and clicking into place around him, felt himself slowly shrink back to size, the enormous anxiety of being a foreigner ebbing - that unbearable arrogance and shame of the immigrant. Nobody paid attention to him here, and if they said anything at all, their words were easy, unconcerned. He looked about and for the first time in God knows how long, his vision unblurred and he found that he could see clearly.
Give An African Child Or Adult A Enabled Environment And Proper Facilities Like In The West And See The Many Great Wonders That Would Be Manifested Through This Often Criticized Race. In My Own Case I Was More Fortunate, But Later Transformed From A Soft Heart Person To A Very Stubborn And Stone Heart Person To Enable Me Push On Through. All Those Who Knew Me Could Tell You Of Me Very Well Home And Abroad.
I am glad that it is old and big. I myself am of an old family, and to live in a new house would kill me. A house cannot be made habitable in a day; and, after all, how few days go to make up a century. I rejoice also that there is a chapel of old times. We Transylvanian nobles love not to think that our bones may be amongst the common dead. I seek not gaiety nor mirth, not the bright voluptuousness of much sunshine and sparkling waters which please the young and gay. I am no longer young; and my heart, through wearing years of mourning over the dead, is not attuned to mirth. Moreover, the walls of my castle are broken; the shadows are many, and the wind breathes cold through the broken battlements and casements. I love the shade and the shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I may.
When the wind blows here, it is your wind; and when the water gurgles among the rocks, it speaks only to you. The mountain stands so that only your eyes can view its glory, and the hill for only your legs to challenge its upward slope. Upon this land you took your first steps, and upon it you swear to take your last. It is always to this place that you feel compelled to return—home.
It was good to be a stranger in a land when you felt aggressive and acquisitive, but when you began to weave your horizons into some kind of shelter it was good to know that hands you loved had helped in their spinning - made you feel as if the threads would hold together better.
I can't understand how she could have wanted to live back here, away from everything," said Jane. "Oh, I can easily understand that," said Anne thoughtfully. "I wouldn't want it myself for a steady thing because, although I love the fields and woods, I love people too...
It would be autumn, and our fathers would be out threshing in the fields. We would walk through the mulberry groves, past the big loquat tree and the old lotus pond, where we used to catch tadpoles in the spring. Our dogs would come running up to us. Our neighbours would wave. Our mothers would be sitting by the well with their sleeves tied up, washing the evening's rice. And when they saw us they would just stand up and stare. "Little girl," they would say to us, "where in the world have you been?
This was a great magic. Festin had no more performed it than has any man who in exile or danger longs for the earth and waters of his home, seeing and yearning over the doorsill of his house, the table where he has eaten, the branches outside the window of the room where he has slept. Only in dreams do any but the great Mages realize this magic of going home.
Only now, when it is too late, do I long for Dearth. I was a misbegotten child of bad blood and bile, and I mistook my own orneriness for cleverness. I presumed to know what happiness was - something I could possess, like a marble, or a man. Something I could only find elsewhere. But just when I started to find it at home, I outfoxed myself and lost it forever.
Everyone has a right to love the land that gave them the things they need to live. It gives them beauty to look at, and food to eat, and neighbors to bicker with and then eventually to marry. But I think... that your own devotion to your familiar homeland should inspire you to allow other people to embrace their homelands as beautiful too.
Home. One place is just like another, really. Maybe not. But truth is it's all just rock and dirt and people are roughly the same. I was born up there but I'm no stranger here. Have always felt at home everywhere, even in Virginia, where they hate me. Everywhere you go there's nothing but the same rock and dirt and houses and people and deer and birds. They give it all names, but I'm at home everywhere. Odd thing: unpatriotic. I was at home in England. I would be at home in the desert. In Afghanistan or far Typee. All mine, it all belongs to me. My world.
The stag’s enormous head turned slightly—toward the wagon, toward the small window.The Lord of the North.So the people of Terrasen will always know how to find their way home, she’d once told Ansel as they lay under a blanket of stars and traced the constellation of the stag. So they can look up at the sky, no matter where they are, and know Terrasen is forever with them.
I'm sorry you don't like coming back here," her mother often said, to cap whatever petty dust-up they'd had. How could Emily explain: it wasn't her mother or Kersey she'd disowned, but her earlier self, that strange, ungrateful girl who strove to be first at everything and threw tantrums when she failed.
You do see me crossing the meadowstiff and dead from the mist?I long for that home,that home I've never had,and without any hopethat I'll ever be able to reach it.For such a home, never touched,I carry that longing that willnever die, like that meadow diesstiff and dead from the mist.You do see me crossing it, full of dread?
All the while she wondered if any strange good thing might come of her being in her ancestral land; and some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpected youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with it hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.
Then a calm fell upon him. The gushing began from all sorts of places, all over his body. He heard pleasurable little giggles on the outer edges of his mind, in the dark creases behind his thoughts. He felt good, better than he’d felt in years. As if he were inside a huge embrace. And he felt as if he had finally reached the right place, his home, his motherland.
I am not here to serve myself. I am not here to be lauded, petted, admired or ‘affirmed.’ I am here to build men, cultures and kingdoms. When I find myself in the midst of difficulties and pain, will I persevere, or will I become a coward and pity myself? We do not have time for self-pity! We have much to do, and the hour is late! We need a broader vision of home than just ourselves as wives and mothers, sisters and daughters. We need to understand that we are to work to build Christ’s kingdom—for eternity!
HereYou always belonged here.You were theirs, certain as a rock.I’m the one who worriesif I fit in with the furniture and the landscape. But I “follow too muchthe devices and desires of my own heart.”Already the curves in the roadare familiar to me, and the mountainin all kinds of light, treating all people the same.and when I come over the hill, I see the house, with its generous and firm proportions, smokerising gaily from the chimney.I feel my life start up again, like a cutting when it growsthe first pale and tentativeroot hair in a glass of water.
For home had a way of shifting, of changing shape and temperature. Home was homeless. It could exist anywhere, because its only substance was familiarity. If it was broken by long journeys or tornadoes it emerged again, reinvented itself with new decor, new idiosyncrasies of morning, noon and dusk, and old routines.
He's pressing me to his chest. I melt. Oh, this is where I want to beI rest my head against him, and he kisses my hair repeatedly. This is home. He smells of linen, fabric softener, body wash, and my favourite smell - Christian. For a moment, I allow myself the illusion that all will be well, and it soothes my ravaged soul
There came to him an image of man’s whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all man’s life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, and that all man’s grandeur, tragic dignity, his heroic glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame. He knew his life was little and would be extinguished, and that only darkness was immense and everlasting. And he knew that he would die with defiance on his lips, and that the shout of his denial would ring with the last pulsing of his heart into the maw of all-engulfing night.
It's like coming home," said Webster and he wasn't talking to the dog. "It's like you've been away for a long, long time and then you come home again. And it's so long you don't recognize the place. Don't know the furniture, don't recognize the floor plan. But you know by the feel of it that it's an old familiar place and you are glad you came.""I like it here," said. Ebenezer and he meant Webster's lap, but the man misunderstood."Of course, you do," he said. "It's your home as well as mine. More your home, in fact, for you stayed here and took care of it while I forgot about it.
That was our first home. Before I felt like an island in an ocean, before Calcutta, before everything that followed. You know it wasn’t a home at first but just a shell. Nothing ostentatious but just a rented two-room affair, an unneeded corridor that ran alongside them, second hand cane furniture, cheap crockery, two leaking faucets, a dysfunctional doorbell, and a flight of stairs that led to, but ended just before the roof (one of the many idiosyncrasies of the house), secured by a sixteen garrison lock, and a balcony into which a mango tree’s branch had strayed. The house was in a building at least a hundred years old and looked out on a street and a tenement block across it. The colony, if you were to call it a colony, had no name. The house itself was seedy, decrepit, as though a safe-keeper of secrets and scandals. It had many entries and exits and it was possible to get lost in it. And in a particularly inspired stroke of whimsy architectural genius, it was almost invisible from the main road like H.G. Wells’ ‘Magic Shop’. As a result, we had great difficulty when we had to explain our address to people back home. It went somewhat like this, ‘... take the second one from the main road….and then right after turning left from Dhakeshwari, you will see a bird shop (unspecific like that, for it had no name either)… walk straight in and take the stairs at the end to go to the first floor, that’s where we dwell… but don’t press the bell, knock… and don't walk too close to the cages unless you want bird-hickeys…’’('Left from Dhakeshwari')
There would remain no sign of you ever having played in this house. Your childhood is going to be swept under a camel-skin rug and elevators are going to be built over the lake we once swam in. This address, as we know it, would be lost forever and we’ll wake up in a box-sized room: cramped, trampled and sensationally unhappy.'('Left from Dhakeshwari')
I don't hate it here," she said automatically. Surprising herself, she realized that as much as she'd been trying to convince herself otherwise, she was telling the truth. "It's just that I don't belong here."He gave her a meloncholy smile. "If it's any consolation, when I was growing up, I didn't feel like I belonged here, either. I dreamed about going to New York. But it's strange, because when I finally escaped this place, I ended up missing it more than I thought I would. There's something about the ocean that just calls to me.
Places are supposed to look smaller when you go back to them, but my road just looked schizoid. A couple of the houses had had nifty little makeovers involving double glazing and amusing faux-antique pastel paint; most of them hadn't. Number 16 looked like it was on its last legs: the roof was in tatters, there was a pile of bricks and a dead wheelbarrow by the front steps, and at some point in the last twenty years someone had set the door on fire. In Number 8, a window on the first floor was lit up, gold and cozy and dangerous as hell.
I know this world is far from perfect.I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon.I know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic.But every ocean has a shorelineand every shoreline has a tidethat is constantly returningto wake the songbirds in our hands,to wake the music in our bones,to place one fearless kiss on the mouth of that new born riverthat has to run through the center of our heartsto find its way home.
In life, a person will come and go from many homes. We may leave a house, a town, a room, but that does not mean those places leave us. Once entered, we never entirely depart the homes we make for ourselves in the world. They follow us, like shadows, until we come upon them again, waiting for us in the mist.
Homes should mean something to us humans. They are a basic instinct. A home, with a life that centers only on food and sleep, is not really a home, it's a house. Beauty and graciousness, joy of living, being used in every part, these are the things that make a house a home. (chapter header quote from Popular Home Decorations, 1940)
This, it occurred to me, was the deeper meaning in the mournful merriment I had been part of that day. I stood at Mam's sink before bedtime, filling an iced tea glass with water, thinking that I had underestimated this place where I was born. I knew it was a good place to be from. I had no idea how great a place it was to be.
Are all societies doomed to amnesia—or are there communities that have preserved their collective cultural memory?The world, which is the private property of a few, suffers from amnesia. It is not an innocent amnesia. The owners prefer not to remember that the world was born yearning to be a home for everyone.
....he will always live in a place he is not from. For a long time he thought that habit would counter this fact and custom would disguise it. He thought, in the beginning, that such things would not matter in the long run. But they did, they do, they always will.
Instead of more consumerism – the buying of experiences, the accumulation of things, of eating the ‘other’ – perhaps writers should name their own environment. What is the shape of your watershed? How is your electricity produced? Where is your water treated? Where is your food produced and by whom and how does it travel to your local market? What are the names of the rocks under your feet and around you? What formed those geological features? Who were the first humans here? What flora and fauna live upon it and what are their habits and interfaces? What stars whirl above you and what names have they been given, what lore? How can one trace the relations, find the slippages between histories, the linkages, to find the complexities in naming and of the named? Travel as one’s carbon footprint; travel as a footstep, travel as a naming in a landscape in all its complexity. Homing as a way to place oneself in a constellation of process and being.
We call it ‘back home’knowing full well that the majority of us may never go back. That we may spend but a handful of weeks in the tropic heat and relentless traffic,tolerating family members we may have convincedourselves to have missed, but very few will submit to that final pull to return. We know our land, our soil as back home, but for many of usit is only the home we left back,the one we left so far behind to be thrust into a lifelong searchof another, of another, of another.
What have you talked about then?” Alec didn’t like how jealous he sounded, but it couldn’t be helped. Ever since Charlie had come home he didn’t know how to feel about her. It was impossible to just wipe out all the love he’d carried for her for so many years, every time he looked at his sons he saw her in them. He had tried to move on, he had moved on, but a part of him would always love her. Everything he had learnt about being a man, a lover, a true friend, a father; all these things he had learnt with her right by his side. She had made him her constant in a world where she had never known true stability, and he had loved her all the more for it. But just as it was impossible to stop loving her, the same could be said when it came to hating her. He f*** ing hated her. He loved her with the same intensity of hating her.
Home, to many of the people I interviewed, is a good, comfortable feeling about the place where they live, and a sense that their place is going to be theirs for a while....Home is any place, any experience that feeds his soul "in some positive way".
History will see this as the residential commodification era, in which housing provision seemed to lose all contact between supply and demand of housing as a utility and simply focused on supply and demand of investment — and that is worrying. Investment is good for the economy, but the investment you want is investment that goes into creating homes, workplaces and infrastructure, not investing in owning them and inflating asset prices.
As far back as I can remember, there has always been a place to which I belonged with a certainty that nothing has been able to take from me. When I say place, that means less a geographical locality and more a group of people with whom I am connected and to whom I belong.
Home is to be a safe place, a refuge for all who enter, a protection from the harm and storms of the world. Yet often or even daily we open our doors -- usually via television or the internet -- to ideas and images that can damage our faith, abuse our hearts and minds, sear our psyches, and tear apart our peace. Home should be a place where, behind its doors, one should expect to find protection and safety from all the harms of life, including voices that do not speak truth or wisdom. Only the foolish would invite just anyone to enter the door of their home.
What could I do to feel happier living here? … 1. Walk more. 2. Buy local.3. Get to know my neighbors.4. Do fun stuff.5. Explore nature.6. Volunteer.7. Eat local.8. Become more political.9. Create something new.10. Stay loyal through hard times.
In New York, I would walk down shadowy sidewalks dreaming of the openness of central Ohio, yearning for roads flanked by fields, for their freedom and isolation. These roads cradled me. I realized this now. I’d been trying to hate Ohio, because it was so hard to be at home. But the land had actually always been there for me all along. As a child, the moon had lit my room on sad nights. I’d wandered cornfields and puttered around at Lehman’s Pond. Those were some of my best childhood memories.
Making a beautiful, happy home is not about what we don't have or what we want to buy. It's all about what we do have, and how incredibly precious it all is. It's about how we spend the days we're given with this family of ours, and making the home we share a place our kids will love to describe to our grandchildren. It's about making our kids' memories delightful.
The truth is, new furniture or a better house will never really satisfy - they will just set new, higher standards for what is acceptable to us for our comfort and contentment. When you take care of what you have and find joy right where you are, you set the right tone and expectations for contentment in all circumstances moving forward. Whether things get better or worse, our standard will be to love what we have and be grateful for it (even when we might not like it).
It's not how long you live somewhere that makes it home. Home is a feeling here, (she tapped on the chest). That you belong somewhere and somewhere belongs to you. But i will tell you a secret. Some people don't feel they belong anywhere. No matter where they are, they are always unhappy. They go from place to place trying to find peace. And usually they find themselves back where they started.
Americans think New Yorkers are property obsessed, but clearly they haven’t lived a day in Hong Kong. In this part of the world, a man isn’t a man until he is a homeowner. His entire life leads up to the singular moment when he hands over the down-payment check and puts his signature on the triplicate purchase agreement. All the good grades and job promotions he has received are mere preparation; and every source of happiness - marriage, children and retirement - depends on it.
Haw Par Villa is the nutty exception. It's mad, slightly unhinged and overwhelmingly rubbish. Without a doubt, Haw Par Villa is the Louis Tussaus House of Wax of Singapore. There is no higher compliment (...) For it's own sake, Haw Par Villa still had to be terrible, macabre, distasteful and offensive.
The residents blamed the "Gahmen", naturally. Since the explosion of social media, those "Gahmen" guys have been blamed for everything from HDB flat prices to the price of oil, climate change, the shortage of Hello Kitty dolls and kids not clearing their trays away at hawker centres.
The rising wave of nostalgia and an increasing interest in heritage sites and historic buildings is perhaps not only a sense of yearning for a lost Singapore, but also the recognition that neither 1959 nor 1965 marked Year One (...) In all the campaigns and features on Singapore's 50th anniversary that I've come across, the Kranji War Memorial was never mentioned. It just doesn't fit the slender narrative. That's such a shame because the cemetery is a fitting, dignified tribute to thousands of Singapore heroes, both local and foreign.
Katherine, how quickly you forget that I never give up when I want something. And right now, I’ve decided what I want is you. I want you next to me twenty-four-seven, at least until I’ve sated the desire you left me with. Then, I may actually let you sleep.” -Joseph
Just like our story, the original Christmas tales were stories of searching, not so much for the lost, as for the familiar. Mary and Joseph sought in Bethlehem- the home of their familial ancestry- a place to start their own family; the three kings from the East journeyed beneath the sentinel star to find the King of Kings; and the shepherds sought a child in a place most familiar to them: a manger.
The world class restaurant is my sweet home.... and the world class chef is my mom.... now I'm staying in the restaurant and having some of my favorite foods with the champagne of my tube-well and the whole area is overwhelmed by the chirping of crickets. It's a by default candle light dinner due to adorable load shedding. It feels like I'm in heaven and a heaven-sent mom has been assigned for my caring!!
He rose and walked to the windows. The moon reflected the pristine whiteness blowing into shadowy silvery mounds beneath the stars. It spread out before him, all pure and flowing and sterling. There'd always been a gentle peace and welcome solitude on a wintry night in this house. A place of memories and innocent times; a place for new plans.
there was a time when this home was her domain. Sometimes she felt proud of it, sometimes she felt tied to it, but whether it was a burden or a blessing, it was hers to keep. She’d known better than anyone what this house needed; lately it’d become one of the few aspects of her life she could control. there is no corner, no ridge along the steps or crack along the wall, that she doesn’t know like her own body. the house may never have been the sanctuary she’d always dreamed of, but at least it carried no surprises. It was comfortable.
My other boy thing is that I sort of have a teeny tiny superpower. It’s not a jump-over-buildings, see-through-people’s-clothes, or lift-a-train-over-my-head one, which is good, because when you can do those kinds of things you probably have to live in a secret hideout instead of at home with your mom and dad. And I really like my room….
Yet though Americans have been driving up to their houses for decades and entering through backdoors, side doors, kitchen doors, and especially doors through garages, architects keep designing houses with ceremonial front doors that are nowhere near any car or driveway.
you are the only woman I have ever met who I would want to be in a little house with, do you see? Other women make me want to get on boats and run away. You, you make me want to stay somewhere, so that I can see your face everyday. So that I can hold you everyday and watch you grow older. You make me want to be an adult man. You make me want to settle down.
I'm working hard to have a good life.You don't need fancy things to feel good. You can hug a puppy. You can buy a can of paint and surround yourself with color. You can plant a flower and watch it grow. You can decide to trust people, the right people. You can decide to start over and let other people start over, too.
The bee has round it a mysterious inscription, which has been variously interpreted. It contains an allusion to beeswax, and one scholar has suggested that the tesserae were druggists’ tokens for the purpose of advertising the sale of beeswax. Another explanation is that the inscription might be one of the mysterious magic formulae used as charms, and that the tokens might be charms to call the bees home when swarming; but the most plausible solution seems to be that the tesserae were connected with the secret rites of Artemis, especially as the stag of the goddess is the one on the reverse side of the tokens.One of the most important animals connected with the worship of the Asiatic Great-Mother was the lion, and it is a curious fact that we often find a connection between bees and lions. At the old Hittite town of Carchemish behind her a long line of priestesses bearing various articles. We do not suggest that these were called Melissae, but in the jewellry we see how the goddess with her lions merges in or is connected with the ‘Bee-goddess.
Sara knew that behind its locked front door no home was routine. Not the house of her childhood, not the apartment of her husband's. not the world they were building together with Willow and Patrick. All households had their mysteries, their particular forms of dysfunction.
A circular plot structure, often seen in adventure novels and quest fantasies, is a narrative devise involving setting, character, and theme. Typically a protagonist ventures from home (or the starting place of the story), goes on a journey, often a dangerous one in which many challenges are overcome, and then returns home a changed person. The plot is usually chronological, with the events occurring in a setting that becomes a circle. By returning the character to the place where he started, the author can emphasize the character’s growth or change while also highlighting the theme of the story.
Every step of the road was just as she'd dreamt it all the time she'd been away. Every step took her further away from the smoke and the noise and the loneliness and fear of the city she'd left behind. Every step drew her deeper into the hollows of the landscape, the green hills and shining rivers and mist-tangled treetops.
I mean, by such flightiness, something that feels unsatisfied at the center of my life — that makes me shaky, fickle, inquisitive, and hungry. I could call it a longing for home and not be far wrong. Or I could call it a longing for whatever supersedes, if it cannot pass through, understanding. Other words that come to mind: faith, grace, rest. In my outward appearance and life habits I hardly change — there’s never been a day that my friends haven’t been able to say, and at a distance, “There’s Oliver, still standing around in the weeds. There she is, still scribbling in her notebook.” But, at the center: I am shaking; I am flashing like tinsel. Restless. I read about ideas. Yet I let them remain ideas. I read about the poet who threw his books away, the better to come to a spiritual completion. Yet I keep my books. I flutter; I am attentive, maybe I even rise a little, balancing; then I fall back.
Home is what we know we ought to want but can't really take. America is not so much a home for anyone as a universal dream of home, a wish whose attraction depends upon its remaining at the level of a wish. The movies bring the boys back but stop as soon as they get them back; for home, that vaunted, all-American ideal, is a sort of death, and an oblique justification for all the wandering that kept you away from it for so long.
Being at home was like a mattress to fall back on with the smallest of peas on the bottom, just large enough to bother the princess. I was damn lucky that I had a place to call home, but I didn't like the feeling of stealing my parents food and being unable to tell them when I could ever afford my own.
You need me to inspire you and remind you how wonderful you are. You need me to kiss you." He lowered his head and pressed his lips on her neck. "You need me to love you.""But more than that," he continued, "I need you. I need you to come home to. I need you to talk to and laugh with. I need you to love me back.
That is the definition of truth, it is the thing you must not say. “The miracle into which the child and the poet walk” [Tsvetaeva] as if walking home, and home is there…The thing that is both known and unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the most unknown and the best unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable, which is of course: thinking. Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort. Painting is trying to paint what you cannot paint and writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet. Kafka says—one very small line lost in his writing—“to the depths, to the depths.
It's nice to watch television but it's even nicer when you've got a drink in your hand,' Gregory Ratcliffe, a Birmingham shopkeeper, told Reynolds News. 'Makes it more intimate somehow. Gives you the feeling that you're in a posh cabaret.
again, her singing was her only absolute, the only thing that was completely her. a thousand classes hadn't given her this concrete insight: her voice was her place in the world, the home she leaves in the morning and returns to at night, in which she can be herself in her entirety and hope to be loved for all that she is and in spite of all she is.
The civil law, as well as nature herself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be, woman's protector and defender...The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood. The harmony, not to say identity, of interests and views which belong, or should belong, to the family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband...The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfil the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator. 1872
What made more sense was that the bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing. The bargain was already in force. Days and years and feelings much the same, except that the children would grow up, and there might be one or two more of them and they too would grow up, and she and Brendan would grow older and then old.It was not until now, not until this moment, that she had seen so clearly that she was counting on something happening, something which would change her life. She had accepted her marriage as one big change, but not as the last one. So, nothing now but what she or anybody else could sensibly foresee. That was to be her happiness, that was what she had bargained for, nothing secret, or strange.Pay attention to this, she thought. She had a dramatic notion of getting down on her knees. This is serious...It was a long time ago that this happened. In North Vancouver, when they lived in the Post and Beam house. When she was twenty-four years old and new to bargaining.
It’s important to honor your ancestors. Bringing in a piece of furniture or an object you’ve inherited from a loved one not only honors the person who has passed but also brings the warmth of happy memories into your home.
Papa taps on the skylight and I look up. He waves at me and smiles. I smile back. For now, I don't need to know what lies ahead. For now it's enough just to be here, safe aboard the Morning Star with my family and friends. For now, it's enough to be home.
It is more than twenty years since we left the city. This is a serious chunk of time, longer than the years we spent living there. Yet we still think of Jerusalem as our home. Not home in the sense of the place that you conduct your daily life or constantly return to. In fact, Jerusalem is our home almost against our wills. It is our home because it defines us, whether we like it or not.
When you break something, is your first impulse to throw it away? Or do you repair it but feel a sadness because it is no longer "perfect"? Whatever the case, you might want to consider the way the Japanese treated the items used in their tea ceremony. Even though they were made from the simplest materials... these teacups and bowls were revered for their plain lines and spiritual qualities. There were treated with the utmost care, integrity and respect.For this reason, a cup from the tea ceremony was almost never broken. When an accident did occur and a cup was broken, there were certain instances in which the cup was repaired with gold. Rather than trying to restore it in a what they would cover the gace that it ahad been broken, the cracks were celebrated in a bold and spirited way. The thin paths of shining gold completely encircled the ceramic cup, announcing to the world that the cup was broken and repaired and vulnerable to change.And in this way, its value was even further enhanced.
You know that point in your life when you realize that the house you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore… All of the sudden, even though you have some place to put your shit, that idea of home is gone… Or maybe it's like this rite of passage… You will never have that feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start. It’s like a cycle or something. Maybe that’s all family really is: a group of people that miss the same imaginary place.
At Bramasole, the first secret spot that draws me outside is a stump and board bench on a high terrace overlooking the lake and valley. Before I sit down, I must bang the board against a tree to knock off all the ants. Then I'm happy. With a stunted oak tree for shelter and a never-ending view, I am hidden. No one knows where I am. The nine-year-old's thrill of the hideout under the hydrangea comes back: My mother is calling me and I am not answering.
Darling," he said distractedly,"about the moon...""Yes?""I don't think it matters whether you want it or not.""What are you talking about?" "The moon. I think it's yours."Victoria yawned, not bothering to open her eyes. "Fine. i'm glad to have it.""But--" Robert shook his head. He was growing fanciful. the moon didn't belong to his wife. It didn't follow her, protect her. It certainly didn't wink at anybody.But he stared out the window the rest of the way home, just in case
Of all modern notions the worst is this: that domesticity is dull. Inside the home they say is dead decorum and routine outside is adventure and variety. But the truth is that the home is the only place of liberty the only spot on earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly make an experiment or indulge in a whim. The home is not the one tame place in a world of adventure it is the one wild place in a world of rules and set tasks.