Home is a secret world that closes its door in your absence and never lets you find it again.

She knows now that leaving a place you love isn’t the worst thing; it is arriving in the second place and having to live as if the first place has disappeared. This is the tragedy – given enough time you come to doubt the place you knew before. That first life, once real, truly does disappear. Unspoken of, it becomes forgotten. And.

What is the difference, she thinks, between a time and a place?

....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.

He wonders what it would be like to belong somewhere and never doubt it.

There is always the fantasy of maternal love, but it does not accommodate a mother's fear of her children.