Quotes About Exile

I desire to know wherefore I am banished?

I do not feel an exile from America in any sense.

Exile is like death. You cannot understand it until it happens to you.

Golshifteh Farahani

I would never write, ever. I might as well exile myself.

Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.

Before annihilation comes an exile from Nature, and then only through wonder and transcendence, the Ghetto rabbi taught, may one combat the psychic disintegration of everyday life.

Exile in a real place, a place of few bodies and many stones, is just an extension (a packaging) of the other exile, the state of being separated from whatever is left of the center of one's own history

I was living, in short, on the edge of a landscape of vast shame.

Even if exile is spent in the most beautiful city in the world, Brunetti realized, it is still exile.

The biggest kick I get is to communicate with those who are exiled from the game - in hospitals, homes, prisons - those who have seldom seen a game, who can't travel to a game, those who are blind.

As Albert Camus wrote, "We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and others.

I felt I'd used up most of my life's words in the palace, among folk who were never really mine, in a place that wasn't home.

So get you gone out of my presence, miserable traitors as you are.

In the desert, we are all illegal aliens.

A person can only be born in one place.However, he may die several times elsewhere: in the exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by the occupation and oppression into a nightmare.Poetry is perhaps what teaches us to nurture the charming illusion: how to be reborn out of ourselves over and over again, and use words to construct a better world, a fictitious world that enables us to sign a pact for a permanent and comprehensive peace... with life.

I missed my studies with Dr. Trefusis inveterately; for reading, once begun, quickly becomes home and circle and court and family; and indeed, without narrative, I felt exiled from my own country. By the transport of books, that which is most foreign becomes one's familiar walks and avenues; while that which is most familiar is removed to delightful strangeness; and unmoving, one travels infinite causeways; immobile and thus unfettered.

for reading, once begun, quickly becomes home and circle and court and family, and indeed, without narrative, I felt exiled from my own country. By the transport of books, that which is most foreign becomes one's familiar walks and avenues; while that which is most familiar is removed to delightful strangeness; and unmoving, one travels infinite causeways, immobile and thus unfettered.

Because of my parents' love of democracy, we came to America after being driven twice from our home in Czechoslovakia - first by Hitler and then by Stalin.

That is what exile meant: no one was coming, no one ever would. There was fear in that knowledge, but after my long night of terrors it felt small and inconsequential. The worst of my cowardice had been sweated out. In its place was a giddy spark. I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.

Exile might satisfy the anger of the living, but it did not appease the dead.

Exile might satisfy the anger of the living but it did nothing to appease the dead.

despite the Turks' friendliness, most of the exiles soon left Istanbul. No opportunities existed there for them, and Turkey seemed an alien land. Private individuals proceeded to western Europe, French visas being most sought after. Russians still regarded Paris as the center of civilization, especially in contrast to the ferocious Stone Age into which Russia had fallen, or to the sleepy lands of the former Ottoman Empire.

Once again I had asked an innocent question, and because of it, I was banished from the conversation.