Quotes About Displacement

Through your actions here today—you have made humankind obsolete.

it is likely that his looting of mortuary temples, his planting of crosses on sacred mounds, and his humiliation of chiefs whose claims to divine status were literally brought to ground when he displaced them from the shoulders of their retainers and made them walk powerlessly through their domains, all dealt severe blows to the religious beliefs that held together Mississippian cultures and chiefdoms.43

One of the things that really got to me was talking to parents who had been burned out of their villages, had family members killed, and then when men showed up at the wells to get water, they were shot.

In 2020 we saw the poorest Indian citizen suffer as migrant workers, in the hundreds of thousands, fled the cities on foot, sometimes barefoot, to return to the villages.

The U.S.' refusal to acknowledge the plight of displaced Haitians and maintaining inhumane practices of neglect, disrespect, and violence amounts to a gross violation of human rights.

One of my clearest impressions about India as a child was that my parents' stories would have been impossible had they stayed. Of course, such a vision was self-serving, for it made a virtue of our displacement.

I used to pretend that I was just passing through this family on my way to my real one.

Inhabiting a place that could not be home, they were like actors compelled to play themselves.

Here she barked out her greetings in Italian, anxious to disassociate herself from the horseless American cowboys and above all from her own kind, the truly lost and unwanted, who move like leaves around the edges of the world, gathering only long enough to wait in line and see if there is any mail

The guy I thought was right, turned out to be wrong. He decided in his heart, I did not belong. I thought homeless was bad enough. But heartless thats ruination.

Being replaced is the worst feeling ever. One moment you think that you mean the world to them, and then before you know it, you're all alone.

It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.

Over 20 million children of conflict are out of school. Education is often forgotten.

I think there are some very evil things about gentrification.

Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.

The farther afield you go, the more you are going home ... as if the gods put us down with a certain arbitrary glee in the wrong place and what we seek is who we had really ought to be.

Think about this: while black culture is a vibrant presence in America today, Indian culture is ignored, forgotten, virtually nonexistent. Even after the Holocaust, Jewish culture thrives, in Israel, America, and around the world. By contrast, American Indians seem still to bear the original shock of their displacement and virtual obliteration as a people.

Even if exile is spent in the most beautiful city in the world, Brunetti realized, it is still exile.

what in God's name was the thrust of that vast expanse of displaced water doing to those stones and to the centuries-old binding that kept them in place? Suddenly the air was unbreathable as a capricious gust blew the ship's exhaust down on them for a few seconds.

How had I fetched up into this strange new life, where drunk foreigners shouted around me in the night, and all my clothes were dirty, and nobody loved me?

No, there was nothing unusual in any of these dreams as dreams. They were merely displaced in Time.

I was suffering, seemingly, from some extraordinary fault in my relation to reality, something so uniquely wrong that it compelled me to perceive, at rare intervals, large blocks of otherwise perfectly normal personal experience displaced from their proper positions in Time.

I felt I'd used up most of my life's words in the palace, among folk who were never really mine, in a place that wasn't home.

Distance is the journey. Displacement is the result.