Quotes About Displacement

Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.

I don't think I'll ever escape the fact that I don't belong anywhere in particular. I've often dreamed about going back to Nigeria, but that's a very romantic notion. It's a hideous country to go to in reality.

This book is based on the voices of people – primarily young people – throughout Burundi: people who have been refugees, internally displaced, dispersed, ex-combatants; in the city and the collines, Hutu and Tutsi.

And now I realize: I was fired. They didn't disappear to watch football, or do drugs. They were getting rid of me.

Je dis : c'est pour cette raison que tu as précisé que tu avais quelque chose d'étranger ? Il dit : oui, les yeux sombres, la peau brune. Et ce sentiment, qui sait, de ne pas être tout à fait à sa place, ici, d'être une sorte de déraciné, comme si on pouvait avoir le déracinement en héritage.

I don't belong on this earth. I always feel out of place - like a visitor.

It's actually very hard when you're settled in one place to completely uproot yourself and go.

I don't feel that I belong anywhere. Or rather, if there's a place I belong, I don't feel I'm there.

I don't belong much anywhere.

When I was growing up, I never felt that I belonged anywhere because we never lived in a house for more than three months. That's all I knew, and that's why I don't really belong anywhere.

People around the world were moving from one place to another. No one was staying.

What? she said once to herself, and then once aloud, What? She felt a total displacement, like a spinning globe brought to a sudden halt by the light touch of a finger. How did she end up here, like this? How could there have been so much - so many moments, so many people and things, so many razors and pillows, timepieces and subtle coffins - without her being aware? How did her life live itself without her?

It's enough, therefore, to glance in the dictionary and find that katorga (forced labor) is a Turkish word, too. And it's enough to discover on a Turkish map, somewhere in Anatolia, or Ionia, a town called Nigde (russian for nowhere).

History is always personal—never more so than for those who find theirs is written by the enemy. It strips the defeated and the displaced of their dignity. It is a posthumous insult.

All the same he got a pinch of misery, thinking, just as he had sometimes in Kentucky when he'd be out in the woods, feeling good that he was alone, with everything to himself, and then he would spy someone and it would all be spoiled, as if the country wasn't his any more, or the woods or the quiet.

For millions of people, she could hear him say with thattremulousintensity of his, moving is a moment of ruin and failure, a defeat that is no longer avoidable, a desperate flight, going from bad to worse, from home to homelessness, from citizen to refugee, from living a tolerable or even contented life to vile horror.

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.

Although I hold a German passport, I feel very much alienated when I'm there.

I'll have to jump around like sodium in the rain.

Alguien ha dicho que el polvo es la materia que no está en su sitio. La misma definición se aplica a las nueve décimas de los llamados perezosos.

To write is to know that you are not at home.

This feeling was perhaps what had once driven his people to roam the world, seeking the home that would cure them of it. It may be the case that to find that home is to end one's quest, I said, but it is with the feeling of displacement itself that the true intimacy develops and that constitutes, as it were, the story.

I've seen mothers and children really being vulnerable in the refugee camps; it's supposed to be temporary, but they end up having children who have grown up in refugee camps.

If I lose my job at a furniture factory where I've worked for decades, no amount of cheaper toys and raincoats at Wal-Mart is going to make me whole again.