Quotes About Displacement

In that huge game of musical chairs, I turned round one day and found I had no place to sit. At a loss, I became a Goth—it was where people who had nowhere else to go ended up.

Perhaps all this displacement of anxiety into the physical realm was a feminine way of simplifying a far deeper and more insoluble difference, for Natalie believed Tonya had a gift for living and Natalie herself did not seem to have this gift.

I joke that I was basically born and raised in airports. I feel most at home at JFK.

It wasn't easy for me to find my feet when I first arrived in Europe.

Beiden schenen wij het gevoel te hebben de laatste bewoners te zijn van een uit haar voegen gerukte wereld waarover de tijd was stilgevallen.

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.

traveling - it gives you home in thousand strange places, then leaves you a stranger in your own land.

Where I live is one of the places where suburban stories were first mass-produced. They were stories then for displaced Okies and Arkies, Jews who knew the pain of exclusion, Catholics who thought they did, and anyone white with a steady job.

We have a moral responsibility to help veterans avoid homelessness and displacement.

Displacement's a bitch, isn't it? We all use defense mechanisms to deal with anxiety, frustration, or unacceptable impulses, but what's fascinating about them is that we aren't aware of them in the moment.

Displacement (shifting a feeling toward one person onto a safer alternative) is considered a neurotic defense, neither primitive nor mature.

Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways.

The tendency to separate war stories from immigrant stories means that most Americans don't understand how many of the immigrants and refugees in the United States have fled from wars—many of which this country has had a hand in. Although

we did not simply live in two cultures, as celebrants of the great American melting pot imagined. Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time travelers. But while science fiction imagined time travelers as moving forward or backward in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles.

With the exception of those born in refugee camps, every refugee used to have a life. It doesn't matter whether you were a physician in Bosnia or a goat herder in the Congo: what matters is that a thousand little anchors once moored you to the world. Becoming a refugee means watching as those anchors are severed, one by one, until at last you're floating outside of society, an untethered phantom in need of a new life.

So, remember what we learned in the lycée, the words of Phan Boi Chau? 'For a human being, the greatest suffering comes from losing his country.

These displaced persons are mostly unwanted where they fled from; unwanted where they are, in refugee camps; and unwanted where they want to go.

We were displaced persons, but it was time more than space that defined us. While the distance to return to our lost country was far but finite, the number of years it would take to close that distance was potentially infinite. Thus, for displaced people, the first question was always about time: When can I return?

Becoming a refugee is a gradual process, a bleaching ou, a transition into a ghostly existence.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Like the homeless, refugees are living embodiments of a disturbing possibility: that human privileges are quite fragile, that one's home, family, and nation are one catastrophe away from being destroyed.

The people who live everywhere are the same as those who live nowhere.

What I am in the eyes of most people — a nonetity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low.

Agora, uma das causas pelas quais eu estou agora deslocado – e por que durante tantos anos estive deslocado – é simplesmente porque tenho ideias diferentes das desses senhores que dão cargos àqueles que pensam como eles.