Quotes About Exile

The experience of this demoralizing crisis [of the Babylonian exile], which appeared to negate all the central elements that Yahweh had ordained for Israel's well-being, could easily have meant the end of Israel's religion. Remarkably, it provoked instead an almost explosive flowering of theological literature during the exilic period. (p. 139)

And Ireland itself? Is the largest open-air penal colony in history

There are always flowers, Love cries, or blood. Someone is always leaving By exile, death, or heartbreak. The heart is a fist. It pockets prayer or holds rage.

Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive. There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.

En el Exilio te agarras a lo que tienes, a lo que no te han quitado (todavía).

REGINALD BURNABY THE GREAT (variously identified as a defrocked Roman Catholic priest from Galway, an ex-convict from Liverpool, if not an escaped convict from that seaport city)

rage. They got up, drove him out of town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. (vv. 28–29) It

The most remarkable observation one can make about this interface of exilic circumstance and scriptural resource is this: Exile did not lead Jews in the Old Testament to abandon faith or to settle for abdicating despair, nor to retreat to privatistic religion. On the contrary, exile evoked the most brilliant literature and the most daring theological articulation in the Old Testament.

the threat of life, so palpable among us, is a threat that can and will be countered by the Creator who continues the work of governance, order, and sustenance. Creation faith is the summons and invitation to trust the Subject of these verbs, even in the face of day-to-day, palpable incursions of chaos. The testimony of Israel pushes toward a verdict that the One embedded in these doxological statements can be trusted in the midst of any chaos, even that of exile and finally that of death.

Where there is no speech we must live in despair. And exile is first of all where our speech has been silenced and God's speech has been banished. But the prophetic poet asserts hope precisely in exile.

I felt that I had been driven from the temple where for nineteen years, along with other believers, I had worshiped the great god News on a daily basis.

Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.

In the future, I will have grandchildren who speak Dutch, Swedish, and Spanish. If they don't learn Arabic, they will be strangers to each other. They won't have any traces of where we came from. They won't be Syrian. And I will live in exile and die in exile.

Part of the myth of Persian benevolence is the idea of an end to the exile in 539. But all that was ended was Neo-Babylonian hegemony, to be replaced by that of the Persians. (p. 65)

We must keep in mind Edward Said's important warning that the first reality for thinking creatively (and for us, theologically) about exile is that it is a form of disaster and trauma that is inseparably connected to human actions related to power, dominance, and brutality: 'To think of exile as beneficial, as a spur to humanism or to creativity, is to belittle its mutliations.' (p. 21)

The assessment of the impact of the Babylonian exile must make far more use of nonbiblical documents, archaeological reports, and a far more imaginative use of biblical texts read in the light of what we know about refugee studies, disaster studies, postcolonialist reflections, and sociologies of trauma. (p. 33)

The civilized world has abandoned us to our fate. We would never have come back to this land if we weren't pushed here by the hatred of Europe's Christians, and now that we're here, they won't let us fight, lest we antagonize the Arabs in their midst.

Ce qui est sûr c'est que je n'aurais pas écrit ainsi si j'étais resté là-bas. Peut-être que je n'aurais pas écrit du tout. Écrit-on hors de son pays pour se consoler? Je doute de toute vocation d'écrivain en exil.

To live your whole life in exile, that's horrible.

Desterrado? ¿Y eso qué significa? -no pudo evitar la pregunta, aunque sabía que no podía ser nada bueno si Chuck pensaba que era peor que estar muerto. En ese instante, tuvo la sensación más perturbadora desde su llegada al Área. Chuck no contestó, simplemente sonrió. A pesar de todo, a pesar de lo horrible que era esa situación, se rió. Luego salió corriendo, tal vez para contarle a otro las emocionantes noticias.

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 defense the only arms I allow myself to use --silence, exile and cunning.

He was outcast from life's feast.

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 calls 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 defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.

Sensational new breakthrough in Improbability Physics. As soon as the ship's drive reaches Infinite Improbability it passes through every point in the Universe. Be the envy of other major governments.' Wow, this is big league stuff." Ford hunted excitedly through the technical specs of the ship, occasionally gasping with astonishment at what he read— clearly Galactic astrotechnology had moved ahead during the years of his exile.