Quotes About Displacement

I don't belong here any more,' Moomintroll thought. 'Nor there. I don't even know what's waking and what's a dream.' And then in an instant he was asleep, and summer lilacs covered him in their friendly green shadow.

I knew then that I wanted to go home, but I had no home to go to--and that is what adventures are all about.

As a child I experienced loss for what I felt was withheld from me: the delicious milk, the mountains of flowers I could not roll in, the cousins I could not play with, a beautiful house on a plateau. As the years grew with me, I became aware of absences that impacted me directly and indirectly: the loss of place, of stories, of family and of citizenship.

We learn we cannot form deep roots because we do not have the right to place or citizenship, and because we do not have citizenship to a place we do not have the right to a voice. We are alienated from our own past and from the future of the countries we live in. Where we are is the best we can hope for. We learn to be grateful.

I am compelled into this country.

The bar was stuffy and melancholy. It was full of the sadness inherent in all deracinated things.

He still felt coreless - he was no one, and he was standing here in the middle of no country. The place was counterfeit, a waiting room between connections, a transition from one way of being to another, which for the moment was neither way, no way.

A man walks down the street. It's a street in a strange world. Maybe it's the third world. Maybe it's his first time around. He doesn't speak the language. He holds no currency. He is a foreign man. He is surrounded by the sound, sound of cattle in the marketplace, scatterlings and orphanages. He looks around, around he sees angels in the architecture spinning in infinity and he says, Amen and Hallelujah!

One thinks one is going to the tropics and one finds oneself in the Chinese version of Welwyn Garden City.

Many Mexicans I met—working in hotels, restaurants, and shops, driving taxis—had held jobs in the States and been thrown out.

He lived in the rich city as alien as a rat in a rich man's house that is fed on scraps thrown away, and hides here and there and is never a part of the real life of the house.

He lived in the rich city as alien as a rat in a rich man's house that is fed on scraps thrown away, and hides here and there and is never a part of the real life of the house.

The country she had taken for granted as her own, where she had been born, whose language alone she spoke, had rejected her and despised her.

The heart of [J.G.] Ballard's vision [is] the object at odds with its function and abandoned by its time.

Man in Canadian art is rarely in command of his environment or ever at home in it.

Einer von denen, die nach Hause kommen und die dann doch nicht nach Hause kommen, weil für sie kein Zuhause mehr da ist.

A guy like that, a wanderer who'd go anywhere but fit in nowhere.

But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you'll never truly be at home again. What you've left behind exists only in your memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you've left behind at every stop.

And even though I'd gone into the room, I seemed to have gone into nothing. Even once inside it, I was still somehow outside. As if the room weren't deep enough to hold me and I had to leave pieces of myself in the hallway, in the worst rejection to which I'd ever fallen victim: I didn't fit.

Yes, and though watching tennis isn't a cure for feeling, it is a clean displacement of effort, will, and disappointment.

it is a clean displacement of effort, will, and disappointment.

Our stars weren't meant for their sky. We have never known the same horizon.

After thousands of nights under those same stars, he woke up as many thousands of mornings under that same sun and trudged for as many thousands of days under the same sky, always feeling out of place.

They have good streets here, but everything's so spread out. I am not used to asphalt, it makes my feet hurt, and my brain. I get as tired here in a day as I do back home in a year. That's not home, other people live there now, I wrote to Mother. Home is where you are now... And Mother wrote back to me: How would you know where home is? The place where Toni the clockmaker tends the graves, that's home.