Quotes about exile
Amin Maalouf - Balthasar's Odyssey
Some women's arms are placed of exile others are a native land.
Amin Maalouf - Balthasar's Odyssey
Some women's arms are places of exile others are a native land.
Ariel Dorfman -
We live in the age of the refugee, the age of the exile.
Jorge Ramos -
I didn't want to be an immigrant. I was forced to be an immigrant. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French writer, said that the powerful and the happy never go into exile. He was right.
Seneca -
The world you see, nature's greatest and most glorious creation, and the human mind which gazes and wonders at it, and is the most splendid part of it, these are our own everlasting possessions and will remain with us as long as we ourselves remain. So, eager and upright, let us hasten with bold steps wherever circumstances take us, and let us journey through any countries whatever: there can be no place of exile within the world since nothing within the world is alien to men.
Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls
Exile from society allows person to disengage from meaningless activities and develop conscious awareness. A person’s courageous struggle to eliminate the trepidation of social exile produces insights into what it means to be human. We can displace emotional disquiet by living a heightened state of existence. How a person’s resolves the tremendous anxiety and dizziness that impetus comes from contemplating the inevitability of death, human freedom of choice, the moral responsibilities attendant
Albert Camus - The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt
From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes 'responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.' It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, 'the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home?
Lauren Willig - The Lure of the Moonflower
It's the exile's dilemma. The home they yearn for is never the home to which they return. If they return.
Daniel Alarcón - At Night We Walk in Circles
The city was lovely. There could be no place in the world to which he belonged so completely.That was why he'd always dreamed of leaving, and why he'd always been so afraid to go.
B.G. Bowers - Death and Life
I have forsaken her for a place I will never belong, but will always remain under her spell, forever to be, a child of my motherland.
P.J. Fox - The Price of Desire
I,” he said, a faint note of derision in his voice, “am the least favored scion of our ruling house, House Mara Sant.” He was from Brontes, then. Which might explain the eyes…she thought again of certain differences, and suppressed a shudder. “I am a Prince of the Blood,” he continued, sounding both embittered and proud, “third in line for the Dragon Throne, and grand nephew to the Emperor. Owing to a…political dispute, I am now also an exile. Presented with a choice between resigning my commiss
Mike Norton - Fighting For Redemption
Outcasts, callused from being in exile for too long, learn to thrive on being the hated; the attention and infamy of our actions fuel us to become antiheroes. Too often do we forget: we risk self-destruction if we fail to follow what we know is right; our talents too often become misplaced, misdirected, misguided from what could have been something wonderful.
Eric Gamalinda - Amigo Warfare
Fuck words, nothing spokencomprehends the defiantly ephemeral.I take my incompleteness with the rest, an exilein any language.
Michael Finkel - The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
Knight, of course, felt that anyone's willing assistance tainted the whole thing. Either you are hidden or you're not, no middle ground. He wished to be unconditionally alone, exiled to an island of his own creation, an uncontacted tribe of one.
V.S. Naipaul - A Bend in the River
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
Edward Said - Reflections on Exile and Other Essays
exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.
Zia Haider Rahman - In the Light of What We Know
An exile, said Zafar, is a refugee with a library.
Carola Perla - Gibbin House
And I tell her about his description because I want her to know what I now know, which is that the place where the pepper grows is not a place to be afraid of…I tell her: Mama, exile is not always the darkest corner of the earth. Sometimes it is lush and plentiful, sometimes it is full of life…
Ha Jin -
I would even argue that, for many displaced people, nostalgia is also blended with fear - the fear of uncertainty and of facing the challenges posed by the larger world and the fear of the absence of the clarity and confidence provided by the past. In essence, nostalgia is associated mostly with the experience of a particular type of migrants, namely, exiles.
Ovid - The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters
Give me the waters of Lethe that numb the heart, if they exist, I will still not have the power to forget you.
Azar Nafisi - The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books
The price one pays when choosing exile is the loss of all that defines you as an individual. The only thing that makes this immense loss tolerable is the discovery of a self you did not know existed - of a true independence. That is the real gift of America, not its fabled wealth and prosperity.
James A. Michener - Hawaii
No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.
Franco Santoro -
Life is a relentless expulsion from where we come from and an ongoing deportation to alien realms. We are in exile and our greatest dream is to return to the lost land. It is the greatest dream because no matter how long our exile is going to last, the dream will remain. It is the greatest dream because when we finally care only for this dream, then our exile will be over.
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa - A Home in Tibet
The flowers in Tibet were always taller, more fragrant and vivid. Her descriptions, imprecise but unchanging from year to year lead me to an inevitable acceptance that her past was unequaled by our present lives. She would tell me of knee-deep fields of purple, red and white- plants never named or pointed out to during our years in India and Nepal- that over time served to create an idea of her fatherland, phayul, as a riotous garden. I pictured her wilderness paradise by comparing them not to t
Yuri Herrera - Signs Preceding the End of the World
Rucksacks. What do people whose life stops here take with them? Makina could see their rucksacks crammed with time. Amulets, letters, sometimes a huapango violin, sometimes a jaranera harp. Jackets. People who left took jackets because they’d been told that if there was one thing they could be sure of over there, it was the freezing cold, even if it was desert all the way. They hid what little money they had in their underwear and stuck a knife in their back pocket. Photos, photos, photos. They
George Eliot - Silas Marner
Even people whose lives have been made various by learning sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible - nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas - where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have bee
Thomas Pynchon -
There are places we fear, places we dream, places whose exiles we became and never learned it until, sometimes, too late.
John Lanchester - The Debt to Pleasure
In all memory there is a degree of fallenness; we are all exiles from our own pasts, just as, on looking up from a book, we discover anew our banishment from the bright worlds of imagination and fantasy. A cross-channel ferry, with its overfilled ashtrays and vomiting children, is as good a place as any to reflect on the angel who stands with a flaming sword in front of the gateway to all our yesterdays.
Munia Khan -
Life’s harrowing echo only to be faded into exiled loneliness
Russell Banks - Trailerpark
When you are a long way from where you think you belong, you will attach yourself to people you would otherwise ignore or even dislike.
Jalina Mhyana -
I’m considering keeping the shutters open, even if people are spying on me at night from the apartment across the street. Especially if they are spying on me. It makes me feel less alone. I have a mental camaraderie with that imaginary person and their imaginary gaze. I find myself performing myself for them and exaggerating my facial expressions so they can see me more clearly, like actors project their voices on stage. I’m miming myself.
Sally Green - Half Bad
I thought that exile meant you had to leave your country and you could go anywhere--somewhere in the sun, a tropical island, say, or America. But exile doesn't mean that; it means you are banished to a specific place, and guess what, that place isn't in the sun and is no paradise, it's not even America. It's some cold, miserable place like Siberia, where you don't know anyone and you can barely survive. It's another prison.
Salman Rushdie - Joseph Anton: A Memoir
This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half-this, half-that, denied the rooted person's comforting, defining sense of having solid ground beneath their feet.
Angela B. Wade - Breaking Sea
I’m by myself,” she said finally. “No family to speak of.”“I see.” Leaning forward again, he rested his arms against the table. “That must be rather difficult.”“Sometimes.”“And lonely, I imagine. Perhaps that is why you came here tonight?”Her jaw popped under the strain of maintaining decorum. “First: I said I was alone, not lonely. There's a big difference. And second: is that really why you think I'm here?”“I do not know what to think. I know you must have reasons for being here other than wha
Jeffrey McDaniel -
Mathematicians still don’t understandthe ball our hands made, or howyour electrocuted grandparents made it possiblefor you to light my cigarettes with your eyes.It isn’t as simple as me climbing into the windowto leave six ounces of orange juiceand a doughnut by the bed, or me becomingthe sand you dug your toes in,on the beach, when you wishedto hide them from the sun and the fixed eyesof strangers, and your breath broke in wavesover my earlobe, splashing through my head, spilling outover the op
William Stafford -
They miss the whisper that runsany day in your mind,"Who are you really, wanderer?"--and the answer you have to giveno matter how dark and coldthe world around you is:"Maybe I'm a king.
T.A. Miles - Six Celestial Swords
Should one continue to follow the faith of a group that's cast him out? Shouldn't it stand to reason that if he was true to that faith that the group should have been true to him? Is it unreasonable to ask forgiveness of one who is all-forgiving?
Janet Frame - Janet Frame: An Autobiography
All writers--all beings--are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force...All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land..
Martin Buber -
Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.
Hugh of Saint-Victor - The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts
It is, therefore, a great source of virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be possible to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his
Mike Norton -
Never say that you can't do something, or that something seems impossible, or that something can't be done, no matter how discouraging or harrowing it may be; human beings are limited only by what we allow ourselves to be limited by: our own minds. We are each the masters of our own reality; when we become self-aware to this: absolutely anything in the world is possible.Master yourself, and become king of the world around you. Let no odds, chastisement, exile, doubt, fear, or ANY mental virii pr
G.K. Chesterton - The Thing
Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.
Christopher Hitchens - Hitch-22: A Memoir
There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don’t much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti-Jewish fascism comes again to the Christian world—or more prob
Núria Añó -
A Jewish woman in exile in the 1930s is an antihero.
D.B. Nielsen - Seed
We are exiles in Time's abyss, strangers now in the Promised Land.
Evy Michaels -
We used to laugh and engage in endless banter. We loved, shared secrets, cared deeply, our burdens felt lighter. To be estranged from you doesn't feel lonely; it's EXILE
Primo Levi - If This Is a Man / The Truce
This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real. Everyone dreamed past and future dreams, of slavery and redemption, of improbable paradises, of equally mythical and improbable enemies; cosmic enemies, perverse and subtle, who pervade everything like the air.
R.A. Salvatore -
These were the companions who justified my principles, who gave me the strength to continue against any foe, real or imagined. These were the companions who fought the helplessness, the rage, and frustration.These were the friends who gave me my life.
Roberto Bolaño - 1998-2003
Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.
Sarah Miller - The Lost Crown
My sisters and I sit together on a pair of suitcases. If we've forgotten anything, it's already too late -- our rooms have all been sealed and photographed. Anyway, Tatiana would say it's bad luck to return for something you've forgotten.
Lois McMaster Bujold - Shards of Honour
Barrayar is bred in my bones. I cannot shake it, no matter how far I travel. This struggle, God knows, has no honor in it. But exile, for no other motive than ease—that would be to give up all hope of honor. The last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it.
James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use— silence, exile, and cunning.
Dejan Stojanovic - The Sun Watches the Sun
Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert?
R.A. Salvatore - Exile
Spirit. In every language in all the Realms, surface and Underdark, in every time and every place, the word has a ring of strength and determination. It is the hero's strength, the mother's resilience and the poor man's armor. It cannot be broken and it cannot be taken away.
Colm Tóibín - The Master
For the first time in years, he felt the deep sadness of exile, knowing that he was alone here, an outsider, and too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners, and indeed, the morals to be able to participate.
Colm Tóibín -
For the first time in years, she felt the deep sadness of exile, knowing that she was alone here, an outsider, and too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners, and indeed, the morals to be able to participate.
Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet
I had come from wondrous lands, from landscapes more enchanting than life, but only to myself did I ever mention these lands, and I said nothing about the landscapes which I saw in dreams. My feet stepped like theirs over the floorboards and the flagstones, but my heart was far away, even if it beat close by, false master of an estranged and exiled body.