Art & Creativity Quote by Edward W. Howe

Good music doesn’t just please; it unsettles. Howe’s line hinges on a paradox that feels instantly true: “homesick” usually implies a real place, a real past, a return ticket. Here, the ache is for “something they never had,” turning nostalgia into a kind of elegant hallucination. The sentence isn’t romantic fluff so much as a sober diagnosis of art’s power to manufacture longing and then aim it at an absence.

The intent is quietly cynical in the best way. Howe suggests that music doesn’t merely mirror our feelings; it produces a hunger that life can’t satisfy. By adding “and never will have,” he forecloses the comforting idea that the craving is a clue to some attainable destiny. It’s not a call to chase your dreams. It’s a reminder that the most piercing aesthetic experiences can expose the limits of the actual.

The subtext is almost psychological: music acts like a memory without an origin. It gives listeners the sensation of having lost a purer self, a truer home, a more coherent world. That’s why “good” music hits harder than pleasant music; it creates an imaginary past tense and makes you grieve it.

Context matters, too. Howe wrote in an era when modernity was accelerating - more mobility, more noise, more fragmentation - and “homesickness” was becoming less about geography than about dislocation. The quote captures that modern ache: art as a brief portal to an impossible wholeness, followed by the sharp knowledge that the door was never meant to stay open.