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W(illiam) Somerset Maugham, 1874-1965

was an English dramatist and novelist

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers at their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever knows. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.

( “The Moon and Sixpence”, p 180, 1919 )

Frank(lin) (Patrick) Herbert(, Jr.), 1920-1986

was an US science fiction novelist

Humans live best when each has a place to stand, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things and what he may achieve. Destroy the place and you destroy the person.

( “Dune” (novel), 1965 )

H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken, 1880-1956

was an American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, acerbic critic of American life and culture

A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.