Quotes About Displacement

But it was not just my grandmother there waiting for her husband to come home happy or dead. The side stories of revolution were there in Tapachula, a whole town of displaced people put on hold, taken out of time, not so different from the Nogales in which I was raised . . . . they were towns next to countries, but inside countries as well.

For those who belong nowhere, and for those who belong to one place too much to belong anywhere else.

Siento que mi lugar no está acá! (ni en ninguna parte quisiera decir).

Displacement results in a tenuous relationship with the past, with the self that used to exist and operate in a different place, where the qualities that constituted us were in no need of negotiation. Immigration is an ontological crisis because you are forced to negotiatet the conditions of your selfhood under pereptually changing existential circumstances.

not only did he deplore the waste of words, he detested the moral lassitude with which they were wasted. To him, in whose throat the bone of displacement was forever stuck, it was wrong to talk about nothing when there was a perpetual shortage of words for all the horrible things that happened in the world. It was better to be silent than to say what didn't matter.

I feel like a periwinkle Left too high on the beach By the tide ... What flood was it That brought me here? Eleanor Morris, "Easter Sunday

I don't know. I got nothing. No house, no people, no place. Maybe that's troubles. Don't I say?

They kept poking him in his bony ribs, wanting to know: Who do you reckon you are? What his name was and why he kept saying that his house had disappeared and all that. It is very hard to lose a house. Why would anyone want to do that?

Prior to Katrina, the South Bronx and New Orleans' Ninth Ward had a lot in common. Both were largely populated by poor people of color, both hotbeds of cultural innovation: think hip-hop and jazz. Both are waterfront communities that host both industries and residents in close proximity of one another.

My brother John loved Big Bill Broonzy, and from that, Angus and I discovered Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy. We could relate to what they were singing about. When a family uproots itself and moves to the other side of the world because your dad couldn't get a job, you didn't feel part of the system, if there even was a system.

In many ways the Palestinians are the new Indians, the Indians of Israel.

If you're based in two places, on a bad day you see only the disadvantages everywhere. On a bad day, returning to Germany brings back all kinds of spectres from the past.

I don't think it's different to be a black girl in England than it is to be a black girl from America. We all collectively share in a pain of displacement and not feeling like we quite belong in places.

If you are asking for my point of view, I would say that the Palestinians should go back to Palestine.

This thing is such a ripple, the way lives are affected by gentrification. On one hand, yes, you're cleaning up this area, you're making it more livable for people. But you're not saying anything about the people that live there.

You lose your home, you lose your community, you lose your school, you lose your stuff.

A lot of people didn't know just what eviction does to people, how it really sets their life on a different and much more difficult path, acting not like a condition of poverty but a cause of it.

We are called to care for those sickened by pollution, house those displaced by environmental calamities, and heal the spirits of those - especially our youth - who are disheartened by a world where human survival is now in question.

I'm reaching for emotion and drama, the drama of the everyday: what happens when you don't have shelter, food, and clothing. There are some stakes. If you're displaced or evicted, there's a suspense: How will you solve that?

I never felt truly at home in Switzerland.

I'm living in Sydney now - but you know when you've grown up in a certain place and you end up living in another, you never really quite feel like it's home. You feel like a bit of an impostor. I feel like I'm in a place that's moving faster than I can swim.

There's a simple arithmetical logic at work. Build more unaffordable and not always architecturally sympathetic apartments, watch the rents rise, the tarts leave, the small shops, production offices and design studios close down, and hey presto, we have another fashionable London suburb indistinguishable from the rest.

All the literature of this century is somewhat burdened by the theme of uprootedness.

The exile is a person who, having lost a loved one, keeps searching for the face he loves in every new face and, forever deceiving himself, thinks he has found it.