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Quotes About Exile

In exploring practices dealing with time ... we have encountered other Christian practices at every turn ... "The sabbath cannot live in exile, a lonely stranger among days of profanity ... The sabbath needs the companionship of all the other days (Abraham Joshua Heschel).
~ Dorothy C. Bass
Of course, there were other motives as well for their migration to the New World. But many believed that Native Americans had descended from ancient Israel—from the "ten lost tribes" dispersed soon after the exile in the Old Testament—and that their salvation was a necessary component of the conversion of "all Israel" that would precede the return of Christ (Rom. 11:11–36).
~ Douglas A. Sweeney
Life without music is only error, exhaustion, exile... Indeed, there is nothing that concerns me more than the fate of music.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
We all make mistakes, don't we? But if you can't forgive yourself, you'll always be an exile in your own life.
~ Curtis Sittenfeld
Jewish refugees trying to flee to the United States found themselves blocked by a grotesque paradox: Nazi law mandated that no Jew could take more than four dollars out of the country; American immigration laws banned anyone "likely to become a public charge.
~ Jill Lepore
We were being offered exile on condition that we were silent about the reason we needed it. The silence chafed; it made us feel we were betraying those we had left behind. The British government was insisting on dealing with Hitler as a reasonable fellow, as if hoping he'd turn into one.
~ Anna Funder
Blended Text You have captured: pinned upon my heart: the wall of my heart is your love with one glance: as one with one bead: as an exile of the kings of royalty of your eyes: my heart you have something of mine: a torn thing again the moon: now the rule: (who knows)
~ Anne Carson
Pilgrims were people in scientific exile.
~ Anne Carson
In exile, I have tried to profit by the past and prepare for the future.
~ Lajos Kossuth
One of the things that Ang brings to all of his projects is his deep sense of being a double exile, an outsider's outsider.
~ Larry McMurtry
And so they played some of the world's loveliest piano music - the exiled homesick girl, the humiliated, tired old man. Not properly. Better than that.
~ Eva Ibbotson
I realized that a new phase of exile was beginning, that from now on there would be other periods, all different, each with its own anxieties, all shattering and overwhelming, and that I would be changing too, passing from one crisis to the next until I reached the moment of truth, unique and definitive — the day on which I would either stop being an exile and return home, or unavoidably, with sadness and resignation, become an immigrant.
~ Fernando Alegria
All that I've done, thought or been is a series of submissions, either to a false self that I assumed belonged to me because I expressed myself through it to the outside, or to a weight of circumstances that I supposed was the air I breathed. In this moment of seeing, I suddenly find myself isolated, an exile where I'd always thought I was a citizen. At the heart of my thoughts I wasn't I.
~ Fernando Pessoa
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.
~ Fernando Pessoa
A doçura de não ter família nem companhia, esse suave gosto como o do exílio, em que sentimos o orgulho do desterro esbater-nos em volúpia incerta a vaga inquietação de estar longe
~ Fernando Pessoa
Every gesture, however simple, violates an inner secret. Every gesture is a revolutionary act; an exile, perhaps, from the true ... of our intentions. Action is a disease of thought, a cancer of imagination. Action is self-exile. Every action is incomplete and flawed.
~ Fernando Pessoa
Today I have only reality, and I cannot play with that … Poor child exiled in his manhood! Why did I have to grow up?
~ Fernando Pessoa
I read as one who's passing through. And it's in classical writers, in the calm-spirited, in those who if they suffer don't mention it, that I feel like a holy transient, an anointed pilgrim, a contemplator for no reason of a world with no purpose, Prince of the Great Exile, who as he was leaving gave the last beggar the ultimate alms of his desolation.
~ Fernando Pessoa
To realize that who we are is not ours to know, that what we think or feel is always a translation, that what we want is not what we wanted, nor perhaps what anyone wanted – to realize all this at every moment, to feel all this in every feeling – isn't this to be foreign in one's own soul, exiled in one's own sensations?
~ Fernando Pessoa
For me, personally, life in South Africa had come to an end. I had been lucky in some of the whites I had met. Meeting them had made a straight 'all-blacks-are-good, all-whites-are-bad' attitude impossible. But I had reached a point where the gestures of even my friends among the whites were suspect, so I had to go or be forever lost.
~ Peter Abrahams
My links to WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden mean I am treated as a threat and can't return to the U.K.
~ Sarah Harrison
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.
~ Roberto Bolano
Exile is courage. True exile is the true measure of each writer.
~ Roberto Bolano
It was as though she was an exile from a world that saw things her way
~ Robertson Davies