Quotes About Displacement

Because sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge just as each son sought to displace the authority of the father in his own life.

Many sensible things banished from high life find an asylum among the mob.

I know that war is very cruel and that life is harder when you aren't able to live in the place you called home.

And so you carried life for the world, Mary, as you fled, to protect that very life from threats of death. Joining the world's mass of displaced people you became Refugee, Alien, Immigrant, Homeless, and settled in a foreign land-- the only place to safely nurture your fragile dream. Like so many other women who flee violence, clutching their babies, you crossed the border defining you a stranger, dependent on foreign aid, welfare and hand-outs-- the charity of others-- to feed the Son of God.

What was the relationship between leaving the country and an aesthetic life? What was it about America in particular that seemed to make one's life unaesthetic?

He was a man caught between two places, one where he would always be a stranger, one where he was no longer a native. Time and change had made him a perpetual traveler, never comfortable again, like many who had lost their homes or those who had traveled across the world, always searching for them.

By the end of 2005 there will not be a single Jew left in the Gaza Strip.

Even the pyramids might one day disappear, but not the Palestinians longing for their homeland.

I realized eventually that when I ran out of places to stay and found myself on the D train and in Central Park, I was actually homeless.

I came late to the genre of folk music.

We moved around every winter. I don't know. Maybe my dad was, like, on the run from the law.

Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.

I can't remember a time when I stepped into an airport or train station without wishing I were somewhere else, doing almost anything else. Just thinking about traveling gives me the willies. Traveling and dyslexia don't really get along.

As a Manhattan resident, I'm gutted by what certain landlords are doing, pushing folks who have lived in their apartments for decades out of their homes, as a greedy tactic to get more rent from newer tenants. It's one of the most disgusting, inhumane things I've ever witnessed in my beautiful city.

I left Somalia when I was seven years old, but I witnessed a whole year in a war.

I woke up and all I could see was Iraqis standing all around me, looking down upon me. I knew at that moment something terrible had happened and I wasn't in the right place.

'Nowhere Man' embodies one of my favorite themes - the hero completely out of his element. It's really near and dear to my heart.

I grew up in a refugee camp. Thirty years. This so-called human-rights world didn't ask me what was happening for me to be there 30 years.

Between 1968 and 1973, the United States and Britain, the latter the colonial administrator, forcibly removed the indigenous inhabitants of the islands, the Chagossians. Most of the two thousand deportees ended up more than a thousand miles away in Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they were thrown into lives of poverty and forgotten. The purpose of this expulsion was to create a major US military base on one of the Chagossian islands, Diego Garcia.

I'm a misplaced American, but don't know where I was misplaced.

Home is where the heart is, I thought now, gathering myself together in Betty's Luncheonette. I had no heart any more, it had been broken; or not broken, it simply wasn't there any more. It had been scooped neatly out of me like the yolk from a hard-boiled egg, leaving the rest of me bloodless and congealed and hollow. I'm heartless, I thought. Therefore I'm homeless.

You'll have to forgive me. I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it. Like a White Russian drinking tea in Paris, marooned in the twentieth century, I wander back, try to regain those distant pathways; I become too maudlin, lose myself. Weep. Weeping is what it is, not crying. I sit in this chair and ooze like a sponge.

Homelessness is a nationality now.

[Seeing an ornately chained Native American for the first time] What Eden have they torn you from?