Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Frost

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in"

Robert Frost, Poet

About this Quote

Home, in Frost's hands, isn't a scented candle brand or a Pinterest board. It's obligation dressed up as comfort, a definition that sounds warm until you notice the trapdoor: "when you have to go there". Need, not nostalgia, is the trigger. The line refuses the sentimental fantasy that home is always chosen; sometimes it's the last available address when pride, money, or luck runs out.

The clever hinge is "they have to take you in". Frost turns belonging into a kind of social contract, almost legalistic, with "have to" doing blunt work. It's not "they want you" or even "they'll welcome you". It's duty. That small cruelty is the point: love and coercion can share a roof. Frost understands that family loyalty is often less a feeling than a structure you inherit, one that can shelter you even as it quietly indicts you for needing it.

Context matters. Frost wrote with an eye for rural New England's tight-knit communities, where reputations were sticky and interdependence wasn't optional. His own life, marked by loss and instability, gives the line an autobiographical chill: home as fallback, not paradise. The subtext is a moral pressure cooker: you may leave, you may reinvent yourself, but the old claims remain. Frost isn't mocking home so much as stripping it down to its hardest truth: the place that can't quite disown you, and won't let you fully disown it either.

Quote Details

Topic	Family
Source	Verified source: North of Boston (Robert Frost, 1914) Text match: 100.00% Provider: Cross-Reference Evidence: "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in." (Poem: "The Death of the Hired Man" (line numbers vary by edition; in some numbered texts it appears around lines 118–121)). Primary-source context: this line is spoken by the character Warren in Robert Frost’s narrative poem "The Death of the Hired Man," included in Frost’s collection North of Boston. The earliest book publication is the London first edition of North of Boston (1914, David Nutt). A later early periodical printing also exists: Salon notes publication in The New Republic on February 6, 1915 (a reprinting shortly before the U.S. book edition). If you need the absolute earliest first appearance (book vs. any magazine appearance), the 1914 London book edition is the earliest reliably documented in the sources I located, but confirming whether an earlier magazine printing occurred before May 1914 would require checking bibliographic records or magazine archives directly. Other candidates (1) The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (Elizabeth M. Knowles, 1999)95.6% ... Home is the place where , when you have to go there , They have to take you in . ' ' I should have called it ... ...
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