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Homing Quotes

Browse 5 quotes about Homing.

Homing Quotes

“Imagine being blindfolded and then taken hundreds of miles from home -- perhaps even to another country across the sea. And then suddenly having the blindfold removed and, despite not having the slightest idea where you are, racing home at top speed. Even if home is six hundred miles away. That is not normal. Just like the superpowers of comicbook heroes, the homing instinct of pigeons is something that scientists cannot explain. They have tried over the years, with theories about magnetic fields and the sun, but no one has satisfactorily managed it. It is a strangely comfy superpower though. The pigeon is not on a mission to save the world. It just wants to go home. From the age of six weeks, pigeons can be taught to "home" to the loft from which they make their first flight because they understand that is where they will find food, water and company. Pigeons can be picky in their journey -- they do not like to fly at night or to cross water, often flying along the coast to find the shortest point at which to cross a body like the English Channel. but they are ultimately single-minded in simply wanting to get back to where they belong. Amid the horrors of wartime, this longing has a particular resonance.”

WarHomePigeonsSuperpowersHomingEnglish Channel
Book:Secret Pigeon Service: Operation Columba, Resistance and the Struggle to Liberate Europe
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“To work your way forward when you are permanently lost means, yes, to be exhausted and adrift, a stranger in a strange land. But... it also means living in a state of endless discovery. The world unfurls itself anew each day with dawn's first cold breath on the city. You re-encounter what you are: lonely likely a body with a gift for burning.”

WritingHomeIdentityPlaceHomingPlacemaking
Book:Places I've Taken My Body: Essays
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“Instead of more consumerism – the buying of experiences, the accumulation of things, of eating the ‘other’ – perhaps writers should name their own environment. What is the shape of your watershed? How is your electricity produced? Where is your water treated? Where is your food produced and by whom and how does it travel to your local market? What are the names of the rocks under your feet and around you? What formed those geological features? Who were the first humans here? What flora and fauna live upon it and what are their habits and interfaces? What stars whirl above you and what names have they been given, what lore? How can one trace the relations, find the slippages between histories, the linkages, to find the complexities in naming and of the named? Travel as one’s carbon footprint; travel as a footstep, travel as a naming in a landscape in all its complexity. Homing as a way to place oneself in a constellation of process and being.”

HomeTravel WritingHomingGranta 138
Author:Hạo Nguyên
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