Quotes About Displacement

I could scarcely believe that my new home was engulfed by war before I even had time to find an apartment. It seemed that war followed me everywhere I went.

I stood there feeling nowhere.

From far beyond the horizons that bound this bleak plantation there had come to me through my living the knowledge that my father was a black peasant who had gone to the city seeking life, but who had failed in the city; a black peasant whose life had been hopelessly snarled in the city, and who had at last fled the city—that same city which had lifted me in its burning arms and borne me toward alien and undreamed of shores of knowing.

So, you wrecked Alcatraz Island, made Mount St. Helens explode, and displaced half a million people, but at least you're safe. Yep, that pretty much covers it.

My name is Carter Kane. I'm fourteen and my home is a suitcase.

Louise's possessions looked like a refugee's beside his, a refugee who spent a lot of time in IKEA.

Palestinians have no wealth or power.

What's a house when you've lost a country?' she says with a sigh.

An anonymously written piece about 1900 has the letter H complaining to the Cockneys that it has been banished "from 'ouse, from 'ome, from 'ope, from 'eaven; and placed by your most learned society in Hexile, Hanguish and Hanxiety.

One of the most recurrent themes in science fiction is its examination of humanity's relation to its own material constructions, sometimes to celebrate progress, sometimes in a more negative spirit of what Isaac Asimov has repeatedly described as technophobia, through fictions articulating fears of human displacement.

For a while I saw myself as an outcast from an America that had always been mine.

Feeling like your life's been ripped apart and put together again, only put together wrong.

The differentiations of the modern world have the same structure as tourist attractions: elements dislodged from their original natural, historical and cultural contexts fit together with other such displaced or modernized things and people. The differentiations are the attractions

I kept getting the odd sensation that I was in fact perfectly stationary, and that I was pushing the world around under my feet.

In depression, I feel I have been taken over and have lost my self entirely. Instead, a rude incumbent has slumped into my life, leaving half-eaten sardines under the sofa and stale smells in every room.

When you get accustomed to people or places or ways of living, and then have them snatched away, it does leave an awfully empty, gnawing sort of sensation.

Le pèlerinage est, avec la guerre, la plus ancienne cause du déplacement des hommes.

Lydia understands that it's not a disguise at all. She and Luca are actual migrants.

She's wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they come from, that this is the better option. That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn't even want them.

She's donated money. She's wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they come from, that this is the better option. That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn't even want them.

come from, that this is the better option. That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn't even want them.

Lydia understands that it's not a disguise at all. She and Luca are actual migrants. That is what they are. And that simple fact, among all the other severe new realities of her life, knocks the breath clean out of her lungs. All her life she's pitied those poor people.

I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in . . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.

Will we welcome people who flee submerged coastlines and sinking islands—or will we imprison them?