Quotes About Exile

Propelled to search for pockets of religious freedom, the Spanish exiles made their way to various corners of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, including Constantinople, Salonika, and Sarajevo. By the mid-sixteenth century, Constantinople had 50,000 Jews, a mix of Spanish exiles, native Jews known as Romaniot, Italians, and Ashkenazim who were organized into scores of religious communities

Just before his exile, Solzhenitsyn wrote his "Letter to the Soviet Leaders." "Your dearest wish," he informed them, "is for our state structure and our ideological system never to change, to remain as they are for centuries. But history is not like that. Every system either finds a way to develop or else it collapses." And with that, Solzhenitsyn was gone.

An anonymously written piece about 1900 has the letter H complaining to the Cockneys that it has been banished "from 'ouse, from 'ome, from 'ope, from 'eaven; and placed by your most learned society in Hexile, Hanguish and Hanxiety.

For a while I saw myself as an outcast from an America that had always been mine.

By the Rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.

Children are angels in exile, so close to God. They haven't had time to separate from Him. Ali

If you've ever been homesick, or felt exiled from all the things and people that once defined you, you'll know how important welcoming words and friendly smiles can be.

La soledad suele ser el territorio del destierro para el hombre verdaderamente libre

Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile.

Is it not true that in ancient times the worst punishment of all was not death, but banishment?

She spits through the fence. Only to leave a piece of herself there on American dirt.

I have this notion that maybe this world is the hell of the angels. That maybe we're creatures with angels exiled in our souls, banished to this godawful existence, howling in despair...and all those beautiful dreams we have are only the ravings of those angels, their screams in our animal minds.

I have this notion that maybe this world is the hell of the angels. That maybe we're creatures with angels exiled in our souls, banished to this godawful existence, crying in despair… and all those fancy frigging dreams we have are only the cries of those poor old angels, their screams in our animal minds

Even in darkness it is possible to create light and encourage compassion. That it is possible to feel free inside a prison. That even in exile, friendship exists and can become an anchor. That one instant before dying, man is still immortal.

He struggles to understand why fate has spared him and not so many others. Was it to know happiness? His happiness will never be complete. To know love? He will never be sure of being worthy of love. A part of him is still back there, on the other side, where the dead deny the living the right to leave them behind. His recovery will be a road into exile, a journey in which the touch of the woman he loves will matter less than the image of his grandmother buried under a mountain of ashes.

Apartheid is, in my view, as abhorrent as anti-Semitism. To me, Andrei Sakharov's isolation is as much a disgrace as Joseph Begun's imprisonment and Ida Nudel's exile. As is the denial of Solidarity and its leader Lech Walesa's right to dissent. And Nelson Mandela's interminable imprisonment.

After a decade of all-volunteer advocacy, I have come to view every incarceration as a missed opportunity to love and transform; as a loss of time, life, and dreams of our community; and as state violence. Some of our greatest assets and resources in this struggle are exiled from our communities and languishing in this nation's labyrinth of violent institutions.

Estoy cansada de no saber dónde morirme. Ésa es la mayor tristeza del emigrado. ¿Qué tenemos nosotros que ver con los cementerios de los países donde vivimos? [...] ¿No comprendéis? Nosotros somos aquellos que miraron sus pensamientos uno por uno durante treinta años. Durante treinta años suspiramos por nuestro paraíso perdido, un paraíso nuestro, único, especial.

Losing his wealth, his home, the life he had built, killed my father. He didn't die right away; it took four decades of exile to finish him off.

The truth is, however rich people get, they hate paying tax. Some live abroad for a year, or years at a time just to avoid it. Bizarre really - desperate economic migrants are driven to leave their homeland because of poverty; tax exiles are driven overseas by their wealth.

Because Jews were kicked out of every country in Europe at one time or another, and plenty of other places as well, there isn't an ability to identify with a national heritage - you'll never hear a Jew say 'I'm German' or 'I'm Polish,' without saying something about being Jewish as well, and for good reason.

Emigration is no longer politically homogenous and is no longer called 'exile,' with the new migrants and new generations of Cubans and despite the minority and extremist current that still promotes confrontation between Cubans living abroad and their homeland.

My childhood memories include a time when the government confiscated my family's possessions and exiled us to a camp in the B.C. Interior, just because my grandparents were from Japan.

The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.