Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.

One cannot, ever, go back to the place which exists in memory. you would not see it with the same eyes-even supposing that it should improbably have remained much the same. What you have had you have had. 'The happy highways where I went, And shall not come again...'

Never go back to a place where you have been happy. Until you do it remains alive for you. If you go back it will be destroyed.

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place — the picture of it — stays, and not just in my remory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think if, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.

Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.

Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.

It is most unusual to return to a place that has changed in ways you yourself have altered.

We'll start to forget a place once we left it

Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.

Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall.

It’s strange how things can change back as suddenly as they changed originally. When one thing happens and suddenly, things are back to normal.

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.

One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it’s left behind.

Where do you want to go? Somewhere. Even if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re going to wind up somewhere. I call it nowheresville. And that’s no place to be.