“I write what I write to find a way home. ‘Home’ in this sense is what one wants. It is what one wants to be. In one context it is love; in another, truth. It can twist itself about and simply be an other-place; a place any time away from here. A way home can be a long way or a very short way. Sometimes it is a long way of finding out what the short way is. Home is also what one believes, and those very other things, what one believed and what one is coming to believe now, for later. So I write long stories and short stories and angry stories and funny ones so that they can be homes for me, that I had, that I have, that I wish.”

– Theodore Sturgeon, from the “About the Author” page in the back of the collection, “A Way Home” (also a story of that title was the main story in the collection), published in 1955. Reprinted in the Notes section of “Thunder and Roses”, Volume IV of the Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, published 1997.