“Maybe the man had taken the wrong turning, but at least he'd travelled some extraordinary roads.”

Source: East of Midnight (1977), Chapter 15, “Dekteon” (p. 163)

[199709241628.JAA08908@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

Variant: Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.
Source: Handle with Care

2010s, Democratic National Convention speech (2012)

Source: Neuromancer (1984)
Context: A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and he'd still see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void… The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.

Lord Goring, Act III
An Ideal Husband (1895)