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ONE OF the oldest of human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.
Margaret Mead

HOME IS the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.
I should have called it
Something you somehow haven't to deserve.
Robert Frost, from "The Death of the Hired Man"

SOMEHOW each self needs a "place" in order to be a self, in order to feel on a deep level that it really exists. We are, apparently, rootless beings at bottom. Unless we can establish roots somewhere in a place where we are at home, which we possess to ourselves and where our things are, we feel that we float, that we are barely there at all.
Langdon Gilkey, Shantung Compound

HOME has to do with where one senses one belongs, where one's roots are, where one's being can thrive. There is nothing worse than a feeling of homelessness—of not being able to find home.
John Killinger, 365 Simple Gifts from God

REAL ESTATE ADS offer houses for sale, not homes. A house is a garment easily put off or on, casually bought and sold; a home is skin. Merely change houses and you will be disoriented; change homes and you bleed. When the shell you live in has taken on the savor of your love, when your dwelling has become a taproot, then your house is a home.
Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put

BECAUSE home will always be here … it is in your shoe wherever you go.
Barbara Stafford-Wilson, at Graywolfpress.org

WHEN A MAN leaves home, he leaves behind some scrap of his heart.
Frederick Buechner, Godric

WE SLEEP to time's hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of time uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it's time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it's time to break our necks for home.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

WE CAN NEVER go home again. Nor can we ever forget or stop longing. Allen Wheelis, The Way We Are

A MAN TRAVELS the world over in search of what he needs, and returns home to find it.
George Moore, The Brook Kerith

ALMIGHTY GOD, our heavenly Father, who settest the solitary in families: We commend to thy continual care the homes in which thy people dwell. … Turn the hearts of the parents to the children, and the hearts of the children to the parents; and so enkindle fervent charity among us all, that we may evermore be kindly affectioned to one another; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Book of Common Prayer

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June 2008, Vol. 52, No. 6