Quotes About Displacement

I'd hate to see new housing building accelerating while taking down buildings where there's 50 people living in rent-stabilized apartments.

A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same Ocean for all the drops, a single clamour of Being for all beings: on condition that each being, each drop and each voice has reached the state of excess -- in other words, the difference which displaces and disguises them and, in turning upon its mobile cusp, causes them to return.

Perhaps the highest object of art is to bring into play simultaneously all these repetitions, with their differences in kind and rhythm, their respective displacements and disguises, their divergences and decentrings; to embed them in one another and to envelop one or the other in illusions the 'effect' of which varies in each case.

My parents' cherished heirloom looks ridiculous in the new house. But then all our New York stuff does. Our dignified elephant of a chesterfield with its matching baby ottoman sits in the living room looking stunned, as if it got sleep-darted in its natural environment and woke up in this strange new captivity, surrounded by faux-posh carpet and synthetic wood and unveined walls. I do miss our old place –

It seemed to me that she'd been expelled into this world not quite formed.

We're a migrant nation made up of people who've been torn out of other worlds, and you'd think we would have some compassion.

I am attracted to characters who are in worlds where they don't belong and who have great ambitions that they imagine will somehow reconcile themselves with the world and make things right.

I think about issues like climate change, and how six of the 10 worst impacted nations by climate change are actually on the continent of Africa. People are reeling from all sorts of unnatural disasters, displacing them from their ancestral homes and leaving them without a chance at making a decent living.

Travel causes some affliction of the eye, and after a while no place it rests looks like home.

This (white settlers) was the section of humanity that was favored in that place, the Indians had no place no more there. Their tickets of passage were rescinded and the bailiffs of God took back the papers of their soles.

And in fact, I am a foreigner everywhere in the world: as soon as I leave my home, I step into a void.

Today we can hear the whisper where we least expect it: in a baby refugee and in a homeless rabbi, in crack addicts and displaced children, in a groaning creation.

What is home? I wanted to ask. Haven't I already come home?

[Nikola Tesla] was thinking of parts actually moving, like exchanging positions in space through time. This would go over here, then that would go over there, and then something else would happen.

This is your home, but it is mine no longer. I have to find my own place.

But there were hundreds of thousands of families who were already barely surviving, or who were making it within the strictest of margins, who felt they had little choice but to stay. Taken together there would be 6.2 million Syrians displaced within their own country—the largest displaced population anywhere in the world.

wrote on the board one of my favorite lines from the German thinker Theodor Adorno: "The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's own home.

It looks like I'm going home, but it's not home. Maybe it's because I have no home. Or maybe it's because it's when I'm not home that I feel most at home, in a place that feels like home. When are we ever at home?

After a while Estevan said, "What I really hate is not belonging in any place. To be unwanted everywhere.

There's nothing like living as a refugee in one's own country to turn a generous soul into a hard little fist.

I wanted to go home. Which was nowhere, but it's a feeling you keep having, even after that's no longer a place anymore. Probably if they dropped a bomb and there wasn't any food left on the planet, you'd still keep feeling hungry too.

I wanted to go home. Which was nowhere, but it's a feeling you keep having, even after that's no place anymore.

It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.

Homesickness is a real sickness—the ache of the uprooted plant.