Quotes / Stranger in a Familiar Land

"...with no direction home, like a complete unknown; like a rollin' stone."

— Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"

We spake of many a vanished scene,
Of what we once had thought and said,
Of what had been, and might have been,
And who was changed, and who was dead;

And all that fills the hearts of friends,
When first they feel, with secret pain,
Their lives thenceforth have separate ends,
And never can be one again;

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Fire of Drift-Wood

No place to run to
Where I did not feel that war
When I got home I stayed alone
And checked behind each door

— Charlie Daniels Band, "Still in Saigon"

Between two places, you still can be torn
The place where you live, and the place where you were born
For one you know, and one seems foreign
When first you become an exile

So many times now, I've been back
To enjoy the music and the crack
But each time, my bags I've repacked
And gone on home to the exiles

— Ed Miller, "At Home With the Exiles"

"It was very happy, but it was strange. They looked the same to me, of course, but now and then I realised that they were recognising the boy of eighteen whom they remembered, in this much bigger, sunburned young man of twenty-one. That's an odd feeling. So is standing alone in the quiet of your room, just as you remember it but a little smaller, staring at each familiar thing of childhood and thinking: that day of the Sittang ambush... that terrible slow-motion moment at Kinde Wood when the section went down around you in the cross-fire... that night when the Japs came up the Yindaw road, the little ungainly figures in the light of the burning trucks, passing by only a few yards away... that hectic slashing melee at the bunkers under the little gold pagoda where L___ bought his lot and J___ had his hat shot off and the ground was dark and wet with blood — while all that was happening, a world and a lifetime away, this was here: the quiet room, just as it had always been, just as it is now. The porcupine-quill inkstand that the old man brought home from East Africa, the copy of Just William with its torn spine, the bail you broke with your fast ball against Transitus (it must have been cheap wood), the ink-stain low down on the wallpaper that you made (quite deliberately) when you were eight... Nothing changed, except you. Never call yourself unlucky again.

I couldn't sleep in bed that night. I did something I hadn't done since Burma, except on a few night exercises: I went out into the garden with a blanket and rolled up under a bush. God knows why. It wasn't affectation — I took good care that no one knew — nor was it sheer necessity, nor mere silliness in the exuberance of homecoming. At the time I felt it was a sort of gesture of thanksgiving, and only much later did I realize it was probably a reluctance to "come home" to a life that I knew there could be no return to, now. Anyway, I didn't sleep a bloody wink."

— George MacDonald Fraser, McAuslan

I've finally found what I was looking for.
A place where I can be without remorse.
Because I am a stranger who has found an even stranger war.
I've finally found what I was looking for.

Here I come!

I sharpen the knife,
and look down upon the pain.
For all my life,
A stranger I remain.

— Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance OST, "A Stranger I Remain" (Mistral's theme)

"Once you've been on the battlefield, tasted the exhilaration, the tension... it all becomes part of you. Once you've awakened the warrior within... it never sleeps again."

— Big Boss, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake

"Steven, Homeworld is not the way it used to be. Everything here is so advanced! I can't even understand it. There's no way anything on Earth can stand up to it."

— Lapis Lazuli, Steven Universe

"Home? We can't go home. There's a line men like us have to cross. If we're lucky, we do what's necessary, and then we die. No. All I really want, Captain, is peace."

— Col. John Konrad, to Cpt. Martin Walker, Spec Ops: The Line

"How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on when in your heart, you begin to understand... there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend... some hurts that go too deep... that have taken hold."

— Frodo Baggins, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Lana Lang: So what's it like over there?
Supergirl: On New Krypton? It's... different. Our people are happy there. The planet itself is beautiful, too, but... It's weird, but being around other Kryptonians like my mother, I'm really starting to feel... well...
Lana: Alien?
Supergirl: Some of them are so different from humans, Lana. They think differently, they speak differently, they... react differently. I've been on Earth so long, it's been hard for me to fall back into being "just another Kryptonian".

— Supergirl (2005)

Kirito: I stopped living in the past a long time ago. That's something you and the rest of Laughing Coffin haven't been able to do.
PoH: That's because there's nothing left for us in the real world! What can we do?! Live our peaceful lives and bag groceries for a living?! No, the only time we were able to feel alive was in SAO!

— I Will Not Bow

"Oliver lost ten years of his life. When he came back home, he saw that his seven-year old baby sister was almost an adult, that his irresponsible best friend was now an executive at his father’s company, and that his other closest friend had already moved on with her adult life, with a job and everything."

— Kara, To Hell and Back (Arrowverse)

Coleman: Your friends seemed to enjoy it, I thought it was a great success.
Billy Ray: They weren't friends. They're a bunch of freeloaders, treating my house like a zoo.

— Trading Places

"I've lived in this neighborhood my entire life. I'm not going to pick up stakes and move just because some drugged-out little wiseguy's hanging around the front door."

— Captain America, The Ultimates

Zelda: I don't know anything about ruling. I know how to move without making a sound, how to kill without leaving the shadows, and how to live in the wilderness. Now that I'm supposed to be royalty again, I can scarcely remember how. I can scarcely remember her. I'm sorry. I'm being selfish again.
Ruto: No, you're being silly. You've always been you.
Zelda: Have I? Being Sheik became familiar, but never right. Does that make sense? Now I'm right but unfamiliar.

— Surface Tension

Oscar: "She brushed off her bumps and bruises, for nothing hurt worth than the loneliness in her chest."
Ozpin: I recognize that. "The Girl Who Fell Through The World"?
Oscar: I shouldn't be surprised you're so familiar with fairy tales.
Ozpin: I've lived through my share of them. How are you holding up?
Oscar: I thought the idea of falling through Remnant into a new world was... exciting. I never understood why she was so sad when she finally made it back home. But now it makes more sense.
Ozpin: She wasn't the same girl anymore.

— RWBY, "Volume 8, Chapter 9: Witch"

"You leave town for a couple of decades and they change everything."

— Phoebus, The Hunchback of Notre Dame

The Unterzee demands a price from all who zail her. What did they demand from you?

Your home. You returned from a voyage to find your home occupied by strangers. You knew their names and their faces. But the place they once held in your heart had been filled by the sea.

— Worse Things Happen at Zee facet, Sunless Skies

"When I have a problem with someone, my first thought isn't how to reason it out, it's about where to find the sharpest object and how much force it would take to get it through a ribcage! I go back, I'll kill someone, no questions."

— Tsukune Aono, He Who Fights Monsters

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