One's own place
I kept my favorite quotation from The moon and sixpence by Somerset W. Maugham. Surely because it has some personal touch. This is about everyone trying to find its own place, like the Bohemians who never find theirs or at least are never satisfied and find everywhere a little bit of themselves.
"I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroudings, 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. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest."(Chapter L).
You can find other quotations in this post.
1 comment:
I love this quotation, perhaps because I feel the same way as is described. But I have not found my home yet, so I shall keep wandering. "Sait-on jamais où les vents nous mènent" ("One never knows where the winds will carry oneself", sorry for the litteral and un-poetic translation), as Les Ogres de Barback say...
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