Before I left home seven years ago I used to walk endlessly at night along the streets, tormented because there was a barrier betw...een me and the steady solemn magnificence of those skies whose brilliance beat the thin little town into the soil. I saw them, but I was alien to them. This barrier is the urgent necessity of doing the next thing, of getting on with the business of living; whatever it is that drives us on. But on that first night there was no barrier, nothing; and I was effortlessly and at once in immediate intimacy with the soil and its creatures.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For most visitors to Manhattan, both foreign and domestic, New York is the Shrine of the Good Time. "I don't see how you stand it,..." they often say to the native New Yorker who has been sitting up past his bedtime for a week in an attempt to tire his guest out. "It's all right for a week or so, but give me the little old home town when it comes to living." And, under his breath, the New Yorker endorses the transfer and wonders himself how he stands it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Englishman, hidden behind his hedge or wall, is not interested in his neighbor's house, and the idea of wanting to read about ...houses bought, sold, or built by total strangers is not even funny; it is merely absurd.... But to an American, it is not only important, it is comforting, it is gratifying that other people are improving your home town; even people who have no personal economic stake in the rise of real-estate values feel the same kind of interest that makes a motherly woman smile with genuine amiability on the children of total strangers. The very linguistic difference between "house" and "home" is significant. All Americans who live in houses, not apartments, live in homes; the Englishman lives in his home but all his neighbors live in houses or flats.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Oh, London is a man's town, there's power in the air; And Paris is a woman's town, with flowers in her hair;... And it's sweet to dream in Venice, and it's great to study Rome; But when it comes to living, there is no place like home.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Boston is not a small New York, as they say a child is not a small adult but is, rather, a specially organized small creature with... its small-creature's temperature, balance, and distribution of fat. In Boston there is an utter absence of that wild electric beauty of New York, of the marvelous, excited rush of people in taxicabs at twilight, of the great Avenues and Streets, the restaurants, theatres, bars, hotels, delicatessens, shops. In Boston the night comes down with an incredibly heavy, small-town finality. The cows come home; the chickens go to roost; the meadow is dark. Nearly every Bostonian is in his house or in someone else's house, dining at the home board, enjoying domestic and social privacy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The time you won your town the race We chaired you through the market-place;... Man and boy stood cheering by, And home we brought you shoulder-high.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Look a here people, listen to me, Don't try to find no home in Washington, D.C.... Lord, it's a bourgeois town, it's a bourgeois town.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the ...rollercoaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Being blunt with your feelings is very American. In this big country, I can be as brash as New York, as hedonistic as Los Angeles,... as sensuous as San Francisco, as brainy as Boston, as proper as Philadelphia, as brawny as Chicago, as warm as Palm Springs, as friendly as my adopted home town of Dallas, Fort Worth, and as peaceful as the inland waterway that rubs up against my former home in Virginia Beach.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You can't appreciate home till you've left it, money till it's spent, your wife till she's joined a woman's club, nor Old Glory ti...ll you see it hanging on a broomstick on the shanty of a consul in a foreign town.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »