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Quotes About Exile

Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.
~ Salman Rushdie
One of the juiciest pleasures of life is to be able to salute and embrace, as elected leaders and honored representatives, people whom you first met when they were on the run or in exile or (like Adam) in and out of jail. I was to have this experience again, and I hope to have it many more times in the future: it sometimes allows me to feel that life is full of point.
~ Christopher Hitchens
You must feel not that you want to but that you have to. It's worth emphasizing, too, because there is a relationship, inexact to be sure but a relationship, between this desire or need and the ambition to rely upon internal exile, or dissent; the decision to live at a slight acute angle to society.
~ Christopher Hitchens
Gaveston: I can no longer keepe me from my lord. Edward: What Gaveston, welcome: kis not my hand, Embrace me Gaveston as I do thee: Why shouldst thou kneele, knowest thou not who I am? Thy friend, thy selfe, another Gaveston. Not Hilas was more mourned of Hercules, Then thou hast beene of me since thy exile.
~ Christopher Marlowe
Thou from this land, I from myself am banish'd.
~ Christopher Marlowe
The sight of London to my exiled eyes Is as Elysium to a new-come soul.
~ Christopher Marlowe
But if there is no cosmic Plan? What a mockery, to live in exile when no one sent you there. Exile from a place, moreover, that does not exist.
~ Umberto Eco
Having come from the light and from the gods, here I am in exile, separated from them. —Fragment of Turfa'n M7
~ Umberto Eco
Having come from the light and from the gods, here I am in exile, separated from them.
~ Umberto Eco
Cautiously he ventured to suggest that the Fatherland had injured its cause by the exiling of able Jewish scientists. The German agreed and revealed in confidence that the greatest theoretical physicist in the world—so he called Werner Heisenberg—had ventured to approach no less a person than Reichsminister Himmler on the subject of the ban against the teaching of the Einstein theory of relativity in German universities.
~ Upton Sinclair
the exiles who at midday relax at the café with their suitcases packed full of memories, packed and ready to return to paradise, even though they - or is it we? - aren't sure if that particular paradise is a memory or a dream (175).
~ Uva de Aragón
Cable by Victor Hugo (then in exile) to his publisher, upon publication of Les Misérables : ? The publisher's response: !
~ Victor Hugo
let us leave this land, where we have met nothing but ill luck and misery, and which resembles nothing so much as a great test of our faith and a punishment for our sins.
~ Laila Lalami
Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.
~ laing ronald david iii
The last blow fell in 1947, when Stalin ordered that the streets of Soviet cities should be cleared of beggars, many of whom were amputees. Maimed veterans who had chosen urban life were herded back into trains, this time bound for the north, and especially for an island on the far side of Lake Ladoga, Valaam. Stalin's unwilling lepers often died in exile.
~ Catherine Merridale
I thought of Asians throughout history being dragged against their will, driven or chased out of their native homes, out of her adopted homes, out of their native country, out of their adopted country: ejected, evicted, exiled.
~ Cathy Park Hong
I thought of Asians throughout history being dragged against their will, driven or chased out of their native homes, out of their adopted homes, out of their native country, out of their adopted country: ejected, evicted, exiled.
~ Cathy Park Hong
Abituarsi a guardare la vita come una cosa d'altri, rubata per scherzo, da restituire domani. Convincersi ch'è uno sbaraglio per temerari, che la precauzione suprema è morire. La morte: un esilio? Un rimpatrio? Come s'affonda in un legno un chiodo, a piccoli colpi, la morte... Pena di doversi lasciare a metà, dopo aver fatto con se stessi così poca strada, curiosità di conoscere il séguito...
~ Gesualdo Bufalino
We never set eyes on Fatima or our dog or the city we had known ever again. Like a body prematurely buried, unmourned withpot coffin or ceremony, our hasty untidy exit from Jerusalem was no way to have said goodbye to our home, our country and all that we knew and loved.
~ Ghada Karmi
His discussion of "the humanity of the ancients" is illuminating (Z 441), especially when he speaks with admiration and nostalgia about the right of exile according to which everyone is guaranteed sanctuary at the hearth of every temple or private home; and the respect for wanderers, enemies, the elderly, the dead—that is, for the most fragile casualties of the human condition.
~ Giacomo Leopardi
For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel like home. Places where lonely people can live in exile of their own lives—far from anything that was ever imagined for them. —SIMON VAN BOOY, Everything Beautiful Began After
~ Gina Frangello
Although some Jews "traveled by donkey," the Jews of Spain, for the most part, walked out of their country. These refugees were the "scholars, the sons and daughters of families who had served their monarchs . . . shoemakers, tanners, butchers, the old, the pregnant, [and] the young."6
~ Gloria Golden
Every master has his Elba. Banished to an island where the life you once knew no longer exists and it seems like there is no way to escape.
~ James Altucher
In my case, I think my exile saved my life, for it inexorably confirmed something which Americans appear to have great difficulty accepting. Which is, simply, this: a man is not a man until he is able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from others.
~ James Baldwin